Twas a Dark and Stormy Night
by OughtaKnowBetter
Summary: The title says it all. Set in season three, before Janus List. Waaaay before Janus List. Got a little bit of humor, and a few Fleinhardtisms in it. Complete story.
1. Chapter 1

Author's Note: a very special thank you to both Linda and elysium1996 for the excellent beta work. Thanks, guys!

* * *

"Are you sure we shouldn't just pull over somewhere for the night?" Amita's voice reflected her increasing concern.

There was reason for her concern. Normally at two in the afternoon the atmosphere was bright with sunshine, albeit anemic sunlight given the autumnal time of year. Indeed, even though the array of photons was noted for less than its usual fortitude in these elevated mountain surroundings, the lack of quantity was still remarkable, as demonstrated by Amita's question.

Not only was there a sparsity of photons, but there was an over-abundance of miniscule hydroxyl molecules in the form frequently referred to as 'rain', though the simple four letter word did not do adequate justice to the weather condition, since the quantity edged into concepts such as 'flood' and 'mud-slide' and 'has anyone contacted Noah about re-constructing an ark?'

"It's only two o'clock in the afternoon," Charlie objected. "It's not that much further up the mountain, right? Larry?"

"I really couldn't tell you, Charles," Dr. Fleinhardt admitted. "I haven't been to the place in a minimum of three decades and my memory has deteriorated over time. Not to mention that the domicile bears less than pleasant remembrances for me," he added darkly. "Megan?"

"What does the map say?" Megan hunched over the wheel to the rental SUV. Not really a rental; Megan had signed it out of the FBI car pool upon learning that the weather in the southern California mountains was expected to rival Katrina in one of her better moods. Neither Charlie nor Amita owned a car that she was willing to trust under these circumstances and as for Larry's elderly pride and joy? Hah; Megan wanted to arrive reasonably dry and intact. _And_ she'd insisted on taking the wheel herself, pointing out quite accurately that of the four of them, only Megan had taken and passed the FBI defensive driving course. And, at Charlie's comments, had pointed out that the course included not only how to out-maneuver people who were shooting at you, but how to drive in less than ideal weather conditions.

"The map doesn't say anything. It is an inanimate object."

"Hah hah. How far from this inheritance of yours, Larry?"

"According to the map," Larry's miffed look was wasted in the dim light, "we are somewhere between four and six miles from the center of Ferresville, which is three point six miles from the entrance to the estate, if I am correctly interpolating the distance in reference to the scale _and_ assuming that this map bears a reasonable resemblance to reality."

"I still can't believe that you inherited a castle, Larry," Amita sighed. "I mean, things like that only happen in fiction."

"Oh, believe me, Cousin Isabel was very real. She is—was—my second cousin thrice removed on my mother's side and, for reasons that will remain unknownst to me and the rest of mankind forever, fond of me in my younger days."

"Not recently?"

"Fortunately, no." Larry winced, the movement likewise lost in the dark. "Imagine, if you will, being twelve years old and being forced to dance with an elderly and obese female relative at the various weddings and similar formal affairs while growing up. _That_ was my Cousin Isabel."

"So she left you this house? Up in the mountains?"

"So it appears." Larry looked forlornly out at the pelting drops of rain, his breath condensing on the window. "I always feared that she might. Now I am to be put to the task of disposing of it in an expeditious manner."

"Doesn't anyone else in the family want it? After all, it is a castle, right?"

Larry snorted in derision. "Proposing that another branch of the family acquire this heirloom would open up yet another contentious can of proverbial worms. Several have already sought to direct my attention in their favor and to my financial detriment. No, Charles, please believe me on this one: I will regularize the title to this monstrosity and then seek to shovel the burden of disposition onto some hapless realtor so that I might return to my research in _relative_ peace and quiet. Pun intended," he added, at the groans that greeted his last remark. Larry glanced at the clock on the dashboard. "Perhaps the town clerk will have left her post, due to the inclement weather?" he suggested hopefully.

"That will just mean that you have to stay another night, Larry," Amita pointed out.

Larry sighed. "You're right. Best to get this trial accomplished as quickly as possible so that we can return to civilization."

"This _is_ civilization," Megan told him amicably, guiding the SUV onto what looked to be the main drag of Ferresville.

It wasn't anything to be overly proud of. There was a town hall/police station/post office/all around government type place. And there was a store of modest proportions. And there was a gas station with a single pump. And that was all. No, wait—there was a shack down the street that, if it wasn't already abandoned, ought to have been.

"Wow." Charlie had his nose pressed right up against the car window. "When the town clerk said you couldn't miss the town hall, she wasn't kidding. Are we sure this is the right town?"

"It's what the sign says." Megan pointed out a small and tasteful—if faded—sign that said, 'leaving Ferresville'. The other side, she remembered, had said, 'entering Ferresville.' _Where's the sign saying 'population 13'?_ she wondered. She pulled the SUV into the rutted parking spot in front of the government building, and she could have sworn that the vehicle gave a sigh of relief. _Hey, the road wasn't that bad!_

_Yes, it was_. Even now, the main street was covered in mud where the torrents of rain water hadn't sluiced away the silt. More dirt had splashed up the sides of the SUV, adding, Megan was certain, another five pounds to be dragged around when they came back out. She glanced up and down the street, wondering where they could spend the night. Driving another three point six miles up to Larry's new home seemed a little dicey; the roads could only get worse. _Good thing I overruled Larry's talk of driving up in that gorgeous old car of his. We'd be stuck ten miles down the mountain from here and walking our way out._

The town hall was clean, if cramped, with a veritable warren of offices inside. Most of the offices had the abandoned look of dust lying on top of mounds of forgotten paperwork. Several of the chairs had provided nesting material for the local rodent population. One such rodent looked up at the passers-by and hissed viciously, showing no fear of the larger humans.

"Uh, Megan?"

"Yes, Amita?"

"You brought your gun, right?"

"Those rats are big. If I shoot it, it will only make it angry. Better to run away."

But the town clerk's office was bright and cheery, if a little dusty around the edges. An elderly lady so skinny that bones stuck out all over looked up and scowled at them as they entered.

"Don't drip on the carpet," she admonished them. "Wipe your feet! The barn's up the road, not inside this dang building."

Larry glanced down at the linoleum tile. "Madam, there is no carpet."

"Don't argue with me! What'd'ya want? It's stormin' outside, and I wanna get outta here before the road washes out."

"Excellent idea," Larry approved. "I am Dr. Fleinhardt, with an appointment to see Ms. Violet Ferres, town clerk. Are you she?"

"You're late."

"As you so correctly pointed out, the weather conditions are poor." Larry gritted his teeth. He was here, and he had a mission to accomplish, and wished to accomplish it with the minimum amount of fuss and bother. "I would very much like to get this over with so that both you and I can seek better accommodations."

The woman eyed him suspiciously. "You one of those idiots with learnin'? One of them perfessor types?"

"Yes, madam, but more to the point: I am the person with the overdue appointment." Larry tried a brittle smile. "May we file the appropriate documentation with all due haste?"

"Huh?"

Charlie butted in with an ingratiating grin. "What he means is, we'd like to get the change of ownership papers on the castle up the hill done so that we can all get home and out of the rain."

Ms. Ferres gave Larry a glare. "Why didn't ya say so instead of jabbering like some over-educated moron? You the schmuck that got stuck with Isabel's haunted house? Here, sign this. And this. And this. And this."

"Haunted house?" Amita perked up her ears. "It's haunted?"

"That's what I said. Sign this one here, and here. You got to have three signatures on this here form. And fourteen sets of initials. Your initials, not Isabel's."

"How is it haunted?"

"Wait a minute, genius, you got yerself more forms to sign." Ms. Ferres wouldn't let Larry escape. "It's haunted on account of there's ghosts there, and a couple of were-wolves been spotted around town, casing the joint. What'sa matter, you don't know what 'haunted' means? And there's back taxes to pay," she announced firmly. "Eighteen months' worth."

"Eighteen months' of back taxes?" Larry was aghast. "No one informed me that there was a lien against the property! Eighteen months?"

"The property ain't leanin' over nowhere. It's solid as a rock. You owe me—and the town—eighteen months of back taxes, mister. Ante up, or you don't get no clean title to the place." Ms. Violet folded her arms. "You kin go back to where you came from, and leave decent people alone."

This was turning out to be less and less of an enjoyable excursion. Larry glowered. "How much? And do you accept credit cards? A check, perhaps?"

Ms. Violet Ferres, town clerk, consulted her records. "No plastic, no out of town checks," she informed them, running her finger over the ledger in front of her. "We run a clean government office here, no fancy schmancy money schemin'. Back taxes due before you git the place in yer name. Eighteen months, on the old haunted castle, adds up to twenty four dollars and eighty four cents. That's includin' the interest," she added virtuously. "I ain't charging you for no sewer stuff, 'cause the place runs off of a septic tank. But you'd better git that thing cleaned out soon. Isabel, she weren't no purty petunia up there."

"Madam, I couldn't agree with you more." Dr. Fleinhardt pulled out a twenty and a five from his wallet. "Keep the change. As a donation to this charming town."

"But we'll need a receipt," Megan slipped in without a smile.

"You his lawyer or something? 'Nother idiot with learnin'?"

A crooked smile. "Ms. Ferres, I can tell you with all honesty that I am the least educated of the four of us," Megan assured her. "And no, I am not a lawyer. Just careful."

"Hmph." Ms. Ferres shoved the papers back at Larry, including a small hand-written receipt for twenty four dollars and eighty four cents. "There. You're done. It's yours."

"Thank you." Larry glanced outside. The weather, if anything, had gotten worse.

Ms. Ferres noticed his concern. "Yeah, you'd better get a move on if you want to git to yer new home tonight instead of sleeping in yer car. There's laws against vagrancy in this town, hear? Don't matter how educated you are. Can't have people sleeping in their cars. Ain't right."

"Maybe we'd better put up at a hotel," Larry agreed. "If memory serves me, the road to Cousin Isabel's former abode left a great deal to be desired. And, in this case, what is desired is paving for the road."

Ms. Ferres blinked. "I sure hope yer talkin' about Isabel's drive being a dirt road, 'cause what you just said sounded awful suspicious. We're a clean town here; ain't got none of them whorehouse abodes. You trying to talk rude in front of a lady?"

Larry looked alarmed. "Madam, I wouldn't dream of it!"

"Where's the nearest hotel?" Megan broke in. "I don't think I saw one as we drove in."

"That's 'cause there ain't one," Violet Ferres informed them. "Like I said, you better git movin'. Else the sheriff'll have to arrest you for vagrancy. You'd best go back down the mountain."

"No hotel?" Charlie too didn't like the looks of the weather outside. "Megan, can the SUV get us through this up to Larry's castle?"

"Better the SUV than walking," Megan said. "Look, Larry and I will finish up here. You and Amita head over to the store; see if you can get some groceries. I didn't see a restaurant here either, did I, Ms. Ferres?"

"Nope. No restaurant. Mikey sold out years ago."

"Smart man," Larry muttered.

"What's that you said?"

"Nothing." Larry pasted an entirely false smile on his face. "What other intricate forms have you for me to sign, madam?"

"You talkin' dirty to me again in front of yer girlfriend? Fer shame on you, young man!"

* * *

Don looked at the wall. It was easily twenty feet high, with a lighter rectangle at eye level. It was a museum wall, an inside one, the paint a bit on the old side with a coating of oily grime, and the blank rectangular area belonged to an expensive Michelette. Or, at least, the rectangle _had_ belonged to an expensive Michelette. The reason that Don knew that the wall paint was old was because the expensive Michelette had covered the lighter area and protected it from sunlight and dirt for several years; hence the difference in color. The reason Don knew that it was an expensive Michelette was because the hysterically crying museum curator had been wailing about it for the last twenty minutes, ever since Don had walked in through the museum doors. And the only reason that Don knew that an expensive Michelette was an oil painting from the Chiaroscuro period was because the museum curator had sobbed it out in between demands that Don recover the missing painting on the spot. For himself, Don wouldn't have known a Michelette from a Monet from a kindergartener's finger-painted masterpiece.

Don leaned over to speak into David's ear. "We _are_ talking a painting here, right?"

"Right." David flashed a postcard in his hand. "I got this from the museum gift shop. It's a picture of the picture."

"Thanks." Don took a good look, and then wished that he hadn't.

Don had seen ugly in his day. He had seen double bag ugly, and then some. He'd seen horrific, and terrifying, and—nothing compared to this monstrosity. It was the painting of some overfed man from an earlier century, dressed in what Don supposed was the popular dress of the time. There were all sorts of ruffles swathed around an obtunded figure, a ridiculously small beard on the man's face—Don truly hoped it was a man—that could have passed for a barber missing one swath of chin. The clothing was mostly orange, giving the man an unfortunate resemblance to The Great Pumpkin. Even in the photo, the eyes gleamed demonically at him, and Don could smell the bad breath from the rotting teeth even off of the postcard. _Such is the power of imagination, both Michelette's and mine._

"You're kidding, right?"

"Wish I were," David murmured. "The curator says it will fetch somewhere between ten and fifteen million on the black market, never to be seen again."

"And that's a bad thing?"

"It's clear that you were poorly raised as a child. No culture." David kept his voice down so that only Don and he could hear. "Can't you appreciate the fine brush strokes, the intricate interlocking of light and dark that characterize the Chiaroscuro period—"

Don interrupted him before anything more could be said. "Any way we can dump this on LAPD?"

"We should be so lucky. Preliminaries say that this is the same work of a group that lifted three paintings in three different states in the last year," David mourned. "One in Chicago, one in Houston, and the last out of New York. Real high class technicians, this bunch. They disabled the alarm system, slipped around the night watch, and removed the painting. Nobody realized anything had happened until the place opened up this morning."

Don glanced around the room. Four entrances, and six windows perched some fifteen feet above the floor. "How'd they get in?"

"From the roof." Colby sauntered up, notepad in hand. "I just came from there. They left a bit of nylon rope behind. There were three of them, is what the footprints on the gravel on the roof looks like. They tied the rope to one of the fixtures up there, shimmied down to that window, there—" he pointed—"and cut out a piece of glass to reach in and disable the alarms. Nice job, Don," he admitted with reluctant admiration. "They even put the glass back in with a bit of glue, to prevent us from figuring out how they did it right away. I had to do some close looking to figure out how they did it."

Don automatically looked up at the window, high above his head. "It looks like the dust got shoved around on the sill up there," he acknowledged. "Recent. Yeah, that's how I'd say that they got in. Three of them? Must have been acrobats."

"That's their M.O.," David agreed. "It's similar to the other jobs that they've pulled off. Slip in, slip out, no one knows until morning or even the next business day."

"Paintings ever get recovered?"

"Nope. Black market. Some word on the street about the Manet from Chicago going to a private collector, but nothing definite."

Don sighed. "So, bottom line, either we get this hunk of canvas back, or it disappears for a century or so."

"You got it, Don." Colby's smile didn't even qualify as half-hearted. "Where do we go from here?"


	2. Stormy Night 2

The general store, Charlie decided, hadn't changed much in the past one hundred years. The wooden counter had a sheen to it that could only have come from generations of hands leaning on it, grubby coins shoved across the warped surface. The shelves behind the counter had the solid look of a craftsman working before the advent of screw-it-yourself particle board, with several industrial-size jars of pickles and other preserved foodstuffs doing their best to weight things down. There was even the gingham dress on a headless figure in the large front window, the hem aiming for several inches below the knee. Amita had told him that the below-the-knee hemline was currently in fashion but Charlie was convinced that the sample in the window was not recently made.

The rest of the store managed to host goods that were more recent: fresh bread, eggs, even a frozen dinner or two with suspicious icicles emerging from one corner of the plasticine box. Charlie and Amita picked out a selection of easily prepared foods_—"you any good at cooking? I'm not. You think Megan might be? 'Cause I'm pretty sure that Larry couldn't boil water if his physics experiment depended on it."_—and then added a hearty sampling of finger foods, no cooking required.

Amita looked over their haul. "Doesn't seem particularly healthy," she observed, adding a bag of apples. "Don't they have any bottled water around here?"

Charlie looked around. "Maybe the tap water is good." _I hope_, he added mentally.

The clerk, an elderly man peering over spectacles, rang up the purchase, putting Charlie's credit card on a paper receipt. The cash register rang merrily, a noisy counterpart to the falling rain outside. "You folks plannin' on stayin' long?" he asked idly. "That's a fair amount of food for the two of you. You married?" he added, glancing pointedly at Amita's bare ring finger. "We're law-abidin' folk up around these parts."

"There's four of us," Charlie replied blithely, completely missing the man's emphasis. Amita winced. Charlie blundered on. "We're staying up at the old castle on the hill. My friend just inherited it," he explained. "He's with the town clerk right now, finishing up the paperwork."

"The castle?" the clerk sniffed. "That old dump? You'd best get a move on if you want to get there tonight. Might be the road's washed out before too long." He eyed what the pair had picked out. "Hope you got some way of cooking this stuff. Not certain there's any electricity turned on up there. Been a long time since Isabel was alive. Going on two years, I think. You'd do best to head back down the mountain. Most everything got shut off in that place. Not sure it's live-able. You sure you want to stay there?"

"Hadn't thought of that." Charlie added a can of cooking sterno to the pile, and a can of lighter fluid. "It's a castle; there must be a fireplace in it. I'm sure we can heat up something over an open flame. Hm, what else will we need?"

Amita, an expression of fear crossing her face, tossed a roll of toilet paper onto the stash as well. Then added a second roll. And a spray cleaner.

There was another customer in the store, one that Charlie hadn't noticed when they'd walked in. She was about Charlie's own age, he decided, with long brown hair, and startling blue eyes that pierced him with a single glance.

She spoke. "Did I hear you say that you're staying at the castle?"

"That's right." Charlie went for a grin. "My friend just inherited it. We're planning to look the place over." He gestured at the weather outside. "We weren't planning on this." He stuck out his hand. "I'm Charlie Eppes. This is Amita Ramajuan."

"Nicole Duckett." She took his hand, her handshake limp and somewhat unwelcoming. "What does your friend plan to do with the castle?"

"He's talking about selling it, but I don't think he's really decided yet." There was something odd about this girl, Charlie decided. She wasn't exactly _unfriendly_, but there was something beyond the typical _don't trust the stranger in town_ attitude. "Do you know much about it?"

"No." Nicole turned away, pointedly ending the conversation. "Mr. Caldwell, I'm going to be needing another roll of twine. And we'll be having more equipment delivered for Marybel, in a crate. I told them to deliver it here."

"That'll be fine, Mz. Nicole," the store clerk said. "I'll just put it in the back 'til you're ready to pick it up."

"Thank you, Mr. Caldwell." Without a backward glance at the visitors, Nicole pulled her hood over her head, dashing out into the rain.

"Sad thing," the clerk commented.

"Oh?"

"Her sister. Marybel. There's three of 'em, living up in that tiny little place that their pa left 'em, but it ain't fit for no girl in a wheelchair."

"Wheelchair?" Amita echoed, more to be polite than from any real interest. Nicole had made it clear that she wasn't going to be calling on the castle with its new owner any time soon. Not that they intended to be staying there themselves for more than a night or two.

"Yeah. Some sort of accident, I heard. The girls were away for a bit; when they came back, Marybel, the youngest, was in a chair. Sad, real sad; she was the sweetest little thing. Government ought'a do something to help her out. Help out all three of 'em, all alone in the world."

"Do they have a jobs around here?" Charlie asked. "It doesn't seem like you have much industry in this town right now."

Amita shot him a puzzled look. Was the mathematician actually interested in the plight of the snippy girl who'd just left? _I'm not jealous. I have nothing to be jealous over._

Mr. Caldwell snorted. "Ain't no jobs around here. Nope; they live off of the government like everybody else around here except for me and Mz. Violet and Bernie-the-mayor-and-chief-of-police." The last title was all one word.

"So they don't work. Outside of the house," Amita added, hoping that it didn't sound judgmental.

"Nicole and Joanie work plenty, takin' care of Marybel," Mr. Caldwell said indignantly, looking slightly scandalized. "It's only proper for young ladies. None of this dancing around offices, tempting married men when they ought to be home, tending to children. That's what you git when you educate women."

Amita affixed a firm smile onto her face. What would he think if she told him that she was a newly hired professor at CalSci? And that Megan was a full-fledged, gun-toting, government-issued FBI agent? And what would Amita say in return should the man share any further thoughts about women in the New Millennium? "C'mon, Charlie," she urged before anything untoward emerged from behind her lips. "Mr. Caldwell is right. We'd better get going before the road washes out."

"Wait a minute." The clerk held up his hand. "If you're going up to the castle, then you'd better take some of these along." He shoved a box at them.

"What are these?" Charlie opened the small cardboard box, and looked up at Caldwell in astonishment. "These are bullets."

"Silver bullets," Caldwell nodded. "I seem to recall that Isabel kept a gun or two up at the castle. You'd best clean 'em out and load 'em with these first thing. Can't be too careful."

"Load the guns?" Amita couldn't believe her ears. "Silver bullets?"

"I take it we're not talking the Lone Ranger here, are we?" Charlie asked wryly.

"Nope. But every few months or so, somebody sees a werewolf or two. Been two months since they've showed up, so I figure we're due. You be careful; hear?"

Charlie carefully didn't say: waste of money. He simply smiled, the same smile that he'd offer a visiting dignitary who hadn't a clue as to what Poisson's Theorem was, and told the clerk, "no thanks. But I'll keep it in mind if we see any were-wolves."

* * *

Don ticked off their list of facts. "No fingerprints. No equipment left behind on the museum roof to follow up. Nothing on the street suggesting where the painting ended up. No new faces in town of someone who might be able to pull off this heist without stubbing their own toe."

"Fat Manny is in town," Colby offered. "He could do it. Not himself, but he could wire the electronics from outside, and hire the acrobatic help to actually lift the painting."

Don glared, but his heart wasn't in it. "Not from a hospital bed, he couldn't. I checked. He was having a tummy tuck at the time. Seems he dropped about a hundred and sixty pounds, and had another ten pounds of excess skin lopped off by a plastic surgeon the day of the robbery. If you'd like to tell me how the man could pull something like this off from a hospital bed with nurses checking on him every fifteen minutes or so…?"

David eased back in his chair. Don's cubicle was cramped, but still large enough for three men to gather in comfort. It was made all the larger by the missing member of the team; the one, lucky her, who was taking a few vacation days before the opportunity disappeared. "I suppose he could be the mastermind behind this," David mused. "I don't really like it, though. Fat Manny always worked alone. This thing had three people on it. Actually," and he browsed through the report on the corner of Don's desk, the report that Don hadn't gotten to yet, "these footprints are a bit interesting. A bit small, actually, according to Forensics. Small as in: female."

"Female?" Don leaned forward, plucked the report from David's unresisting fingers. "That narrows down the search. How many female cat burglars do we have in the database who specialize in art theft?"

"That's easy." Now David's smile was clearly unhappy. "None."

"None? As in, not one? Not two? Zero?"

"You got it, Don."

"Well, that's no good." Don scowled at the report, as if it could come up with an answer through fear of what he might do. If only it was that easy… "Forensics say anything else worthwhile?"

"Lots of little factoids, but nothing that moves us forward very fast." David scanned further through the second report. "Pretty much the stuff that we already know: female, at least two but more likely three perpetrators. They shimmied up to the roof using the fire escape and then dangled themselves down to the window on ropes. They cut open the window, reached in and unlocked it, then let themselves down with more rope. From there they simply walked over to the Michelette, turned off the alarm system, cut the painting out of its frame, and left the same way they entered."

"The outside alarm system?"

"Also turned off." David flipped to another page. "Hey, this looks pretty unique. Forensics found a nice little timer wired into the alarm system, set to disrupt the signal from one in the morning to six. I guess that fixes the time of the robbery to within a few hours, as if we didn't know that they did it sometime during the night."

"More than that. It gives us a place to start. How many places carry electronic equipment sophisticated enough to do the job? I mean, it's not like they can walk into the local hardware store and build it out of bailing wire and a wrench." Don plucked the second report out of David's unresisting hands, handing him back the first. "Anybody got a better idea?"

"I'd like to hit my fences, Don," Colby suggested. "Maybe there've been some offers floating the streets for the painting."

"Do that, but don't waste much time on it. If the stuff from the Chicago and the other jobs haven't surfaced, then neither will this one. Somebody's playing it smart, hoarding the paintings until they cool off. Check it out anyway, Colby. Maybe this isn't connected to the other three."

"That'd be nice," David muttered. "Then we could dump this mess onto LAPD where it belongs."

Don ignored the complaint. "In the meantime, let's see what we can turn up on this electronic stuff. Let's growl at Forensics until they can give us some model numbers, that sort of thing. Maybe we'll get lucky, and something'll be a custom job." He hoisted himself out of his chair, eager to get out of his office.

David had one more question. "When's Megan getting back? Female cat burglars; we could use some heavy-duty profiling right about now."

"Hah. She and Charlie are with Larry and Amita, checking out some musty old castle up in the mountains that Larry inherited. _Fake_ castle; something built by some old railroad owner, I think I heard. They're probably having the time of their lives, hunting out the nooks and crannies, looking at whatever stuff got left behind. Don't expect Megan back for another four days."

"Lucky her," Colby muttered.

* * *

Amita closed her eyes tightly. It was the only way not to be looking down over a hundred foot high, mud-drenched cliff that was, by her estimate, a mere six inches away from the tires on the SUV. It wouldn't take much for the ground to give way beneath the heavily laden vehicle and send them all plunging down to the mountain-fed stream currently masquerading as a rambunctious river with white-capped rapids.

She really wished that she was back at FBI headquarters. Not that there was any particular case going on, but, given the circumstances, she could have been pouring over the accident reports of an SUV sliding down a mountainside, helping Charlie to calculate the amount of water necessary to de-stabilize the slope so that an SUV weighing as much as this one did would break down the roadway and carry the occupants to their deaths below. Okay, factoid: inside the FBI headquarters—warm and dry—beat outside in an SUV about to go over a cliff—wet and scared—any day.

The sole good point about this little adventure was that Megan was driving, hunched over the wheel and struggling to keep them on this miserable excuse for a road. Amita knew that she herself would have put the SUV over the cliff by now, and as for the other two? Larry was good with his ancient roadster on a well-paved country road—which this was not. And Charlie? Amita wondered if the math genius might not drive the SUV over the edge just to see what happened. _Genius is next to madness, and sometimes more than a little uncomfortable._

Larry braced himself against front dashboard, peering into the four o'clock darkness. "I think I see it," he called out. "It's located up the next hill." His own knuckles were whitened, proving that the physicist did indeed possess common sense.

Charlie craned his head. "How can you tell? I don't see anything."

"Do you see that large area of blackness, Charles?"

"Yes. Sort of."

"That's it."

"Oh." Charlie struggled to make the distant features come clear, and failed. "How far?"

"I estimate not more than two miles at most," came the answer.

Megan humphed. "I'm hoping for less than that," she said. "I'm also hoping that I don't get us stuck, and we have to hoof the last part."

Larry's smile wasn't cordial. "I have every confidence in you, Megan."

They could all hear the return reply, unvoiced, from Megan: _there's one born every minute, from P.T. Barnum._

As if in response the rear wheel slewed around, spraying mud into the air behind them.

"Damn," was Megan's breathless comment, hauling at the steering wheel. "C'mon, c'mon," she implored the big vehicle. More mud sprayed; she applied more gas, begging for traction.

It almost worked: they inched forward, digging a trench in the road, digging down to the rock layer—then stopped.

Megan spun the wheels of the SUV, trying to move it forward into a spot where the rubber would grab the road again. Nothing. Pebbles arched into the air, cascading down the mountainside.

She powered down the engine, sighing. "How far am I from the edge?" she asked.

Charlie looked out through the glass. "You've got at least three inches," he told her. "Plenty of room."

"I don't think so, Charlie. I'm thinking that rocking this baby back and forth is a good way to end up another hundred feet away from where we want to be," Megan replied. "Straight down. And crunched."

Larry shuddered. "I presume this means that a more mundane form of forward locomotion is required?"

"If you're asking if I think we're going to have to get out and push this baby to keep it from going off the road and down the cliff, then you're right."

Larry sighed. "Which means that cold, wet, and filthy will be the next condition of life. And unfortunately, knowing my late Cousin Isabel, I very much doubt that hot showers will be a possibility once we arrive at our destination. Not only will the water have been turned off, but the bathrooms not cared for since well before her demise. Cousin Isabel was never noted for her attention to the details of her abode."

Amita's smile was likewise lukewarm. "I hope the fireplaces aren't covered over in brush. Heat would be nice."

They were soaked through to the skin in no time. Knowing that the quartet would be getting out of the shelter of the vehicle's interior, the raindrops decided that _now_ would be a good time to deposit the major portion of the water that the clouds had been saving for just the right moment. But the four persevered, getting out of the car to push.

"We need to apply leverage _here_, Charles. Archimedes' Principle clearly states—"

"This is a _car_, Larry, not a lever. Certain limitations apply under these circumstances. Like, I need to get a grip with my hands, and there's nowhere to grip _there_—"

"If you grasp it _there_, you will be unable to maintain your footing, and—"

"I can stand _here_ just fine, Larry. If I stand where you want me to, I'm going slip down the ravine—"

Math vs. Physics, Amita thought, struggling to keep the smile from emerging at the antics of the pair. It sounded like a miracle that they weren't at each other's throats, and it was only through knowing them both that Amita understood that they were friends and would remain so. Anyone listening in would have instantly assumed that World War III was about to break out. Nope; just the travel-version of healthy debate, academia style.

Megan gunned the engine at just the moment to both drown out the argument and move the SUV forward. It wasn't easy, but she broke them all free of both mud and verbal battle.

Amita cheered. "Back in the car," she urged. "It can't be far to the castle."

"We're soaked," Larry moaned. "We'll get the car wet. It will take days to dry out."

"I really don't care at the moment," Megan told him firmly. "I just want to get to your new home and out of the rain."

"It will be drier," Larry admitted. He started to crawl back inside the SUV. "Wait a minute! What's that over there?"

"What?"

"Over there! That black shape. What is it?"

"I see it," Charlie affirmed. "It's not a bear. What is it?"

"_I_ can't see it." Megan craned her neck around, trying to see through the rain. "Where is it?"

"Next to that boulder. Amita?"

"I see something," Amita said doubtfully. "I'm not sure what it is. It looks like a great big black blotch."

"Definitely not a bear," Charlie said. "A man? The shape isn't quite right."

"It's gone now." Larry pulled himself back into the SUV, closing the door and shutting out the rain. "Whatever it was, it's gone. We shall never know. Although it did look suspiciously man-like in appearance."

"Maybe it was the store-keeper's were-wolf," Amita teased. "He did say that one was due to show up any day."

"No one would be crazy enough to be out in the rain," Megan disagreed. "Were-wolf, human, or otherwise."

"_We're_ out in the rain," Larry pointed out.

"And _we're_ trying to get inside. Let's go."


	3. Stormy Night 3

"Chromantic 104C," Don said patiently. "I understand that you carry them. Do you keep records on who you sell to?"

The store was bright and clean, and the shelves stocked with small and large packages labeled with irrational titles telling computer aficionados what was contained within but completely incomprehensible to those—like Don—who considered computers to be merely useful tools in the pursuit of other, more worthwhile pursuits like _pursuing_ a suspect. A string of letters and numbers told him nothing about the functionality of a particular piece of equipment. The sole highlight of today's excursion was that the place was relatively well-organized, and that Don wasn't wearing out shoe leather by chasing down the store owner yelling, 'FBI! Freeze!'

"Some," the store owner admitted cheerfully, "but not all. You're welcome to look at my files."

"Thanks, I'll do that." This was a change, Don reflected: someone who was trying to be helpful. Usually he ran across only surly types who'd refuse to hand over a copy of the alphabet, just in case he wanted to use it to see if he could arrest them for failure to comply with alphabetizing their filing systems.

"Actually, I think you'll probably want to see my mail order business," the girl told him. "I do some over the counter selling, but a lot more through the 'net. I pay a fortune for my website and I make it all back and then some. Mall stores are on the way out; everything's internet these days."

"Yeah." That didn't look good. The girl was right; the cat burglars could just as easily have purchased their electronic toys over the 'net, with no one the wiser. Well, he might as well take a look at the store records. He might get lucky. "How many places sell these sorts of things? These Chromantic's?"

"Not too many. There's me, and there's a place up north in San Francisco, and one in Boston. I don't think anybody else does. The manufacturer is strictly small time out of his garage, only whole-sales to a few of us who put up with his antics, like delaying a shipment because he thinks it's gonna rain somewhere in the U.S. and his stuff'll get wet through the packaging." The girl leaned over the counter, treating Don to a display of her decidedly non-computer type charms. Her blouse just barely covered what it was supposed to. "You really FBI?"

"Down to the gold badge." Don crossed around behind the counter. "Where are the files? Can I access them from this computer?"

"Um, try the one in this back room. Here, let me show you." The girl drew him toward the back door, her hand lightly on his sleeve. "My name's Mindy, by the way. What's yours?"

Don blinked. There was a sub-text here that he needed to be wary of. "I'm Special Agent Eppes," he replied dryly. "I appreciate your cooperation. Agent Sinclair," he called out. "Would you give us a hand, here? Ms. Walters will be letting us see her computer files." _And I need a chaperone. This chick wants to show me her etchings, on company time, no less_.

Let it never be said that Agent Sinclair ignored a cry for help. "Certainly, Agent Eppes," he replied formally. "Agent Granger, I'll rejoin you in a few moments."

"Take your time, guys." Colby was engrossed in some of the other electronic toys for sale, drooling with tech-lust. "I'm cross-matching some of the other things that Forensics came up with. I'm seeing a lot of them right here, Don."

"Keep at it," Don instructed. "Maybe we'll have lucked out. Maybe, against all odds, our thieves used this place for their equipment."

Mindy was openly pouting by the time Don arrived in her back office, David in tow. She heaved a sigh, letting her chest rise up and down, giving off signals that could be used by air traffic controllers, but Don refused to acknowledge them.

"You've got a nice search engine here, ma'am," he said carefully, all but dragging David next to him. "David, I'm looking at six possibles here, all that have purchased these Chromantics in the past three months. All they all that popular?" Don couldn't remember having heard of those particular pieces of equipment before.

"Not really," David replied, tapping on the keyboard. "Output is so small that only a few aficionados have even heard of them."

"What are they used for? Outside of burglary, that is."

"Burglary?" Mindy asked, opening her eyes wide, trying to insert herself next to Don. "Did you say burglary?"

"Official investigation, ma'am." It was David's turn to say something. He raised his voice. "Colby? Did you say that a Wrachet 2000 was part of the bundle?"

"Looked like it. They did something funky with it, but Forensics thinks that the 2000 was the base."

"Don, I'm liking these six." David copied down the names and addresses from the computer screen in front of him. "They all purchased a Chromantic and a Wrachet 2000, among other things. Now, these toys _could_ be used for other things…" he trailed off.

"But we don't have anything that looks like a better lead," Don finished for him. "Right. We'll check 'em out. Thank you for your cooperation, ma'am," he told the store owner.

"That's all?" Mindy asked, disappointed. "You could come back later. I might remember something significant."

"You can always call us."

"I don't have your card." Mindy batted her eyelashes.

_And you're not getting one from me, lady_. "Agent Sinclair, would you rectify that for me, please?" _Do it, or you're fired, guy!_

"Certainly." David presented Mindy with a business card. A very plain one. "Call us if you think of anything else, miss."

"Thank you." It wasn't heartfelt, and Mindy was letting him know beyond a shadow of a doubt that she wanted _Don's_ name, badge, and serial number—in her bed, with handcuffs and maybe a few other kinky toys, and she didn't mean a Wrachet 2000. Don didn't care. He escaped, the other two trailing behind him.

* * *

Larry sneezed.

"Bless you," Megan said automatically, looking around her in awe. "Larry, when you said this place was a castle, you weren't kidding! This place is magnificent!"

Amita felt very small—and filthy—as she gazed around the shrouded Great Hall. The capitalized words were entirely appropriate: she could fit her whole apartment into this room alone, and have enough room left over to squeeze in the contents of Charlie's house. It was _huge!_ The ceiling soared high enough to accommodate a cloud or two, with some artistic sort of fresco rendering that she couldn't quite make out beyond the grime. Okay, this was a room on a cloudy day. She'd be able to see the sky-borne scene once the place was dusted.

And dust there was. It covered the plastic sheeting that had been draped over massive furniture, over the grand piano in the corner, over the gilded harp that sat next to it, more dust laden onto the gold frames that wrapped around oil portraits of long dead people. Larry sneezed again.

"Bless you," Megan repeated, still taking in the sights.

"That was my Cousin Isabel," Larry said grumpily. "Big and huge and covered in dust." Another sneeze.

"But dry," Charlie pointed out. He set his bag down onto the floor, sending up a cloud of dirt whirling into the still air. "I'd like to get out of these wet things."

If majestic was one descriptive word, then cluttered was the other to portray the Great Hall. Larry had been entirely correct in his rendition of Cousin Isabel: she kept everything. And everything included piles of old newspapers, sacks of cloth scraps left over from various curtains and re-upholsterings, and small knick-knacks collected from every part of the world. One such, an inexpressibly ugly statue of some nature god—or, more likely, a demon. Nothing that ugly could possibly be benevolent enough to qualify as a sprite of nature—leered down at them from atop the mantel of the fireplace with a surfeit of soot under the grate.

Larry pointed out the staircase. Not that anyone could miss it; it was the type designed for Scarlett O'Hara to make a grand entrance upon. "The bedrooms are upstairs. There are several of them; we could select two a piece and still have rooms left over for the maid and butler. Not that Cousin Isabel had any, even in her declining years. Although she did employ a health care worker who doubled as a house-keeper. I understand that woman was paid off in the will and has since returned to Costa Rica to live out her own remaining years in comfort."

"And the furniture?" Megan clearly had visions of sharing her bed with a nest of assertive rats.

"We will see," Larry responded darkly. "I had _anticipated_ spending the night in the relative comfort of an establishment designed for temporary housing with an attached eatery and relatively competent cooking personnel. Obviously my hopes were destined to be dashed."

"A hotel with a restaurant," Amita translated. "Didn't you know that Ferresville was this small and didn't have anything like that?"

"Alas, the last time I visited Cousin Isabel in her lair was at the tender age of nine. After that, my parents took pity on me and restricted her visits to the marginally less erratic habitations of other relatives. At the time I was too entranced by the dirt roads and the 'quaintness' of it all to take notice of the lack of amenities."

Megan shrugged. "We'll make the best of it. Larry, how about you and Charlie seeing if you can build some sort of a fire in the fireplace. Amita and I will investigate upstairs." She patted her handbag reassuringly. "If you hear gunshots, it's just me scaring off the wildlife."

The smile on Amita's face, to her credit, stayed frozen in place.

* * *

Colby flopped into the chair in Don's office. "My feet hurt," he complained. "Did I ever say that I liked field work? I take it all back. I hate pounding the pavement."

"I'll trade you." David Sinclair's eyes had that slightly glazed look from too many hours spent in front of an unforgiving computer screen. "Some of these people that I'm trying to trace are seriously paranoid. That one in Idaho has more locks to hack through than Fort Knox."

"Think maybe he has something to hide?"

"Yeah, but I'm turning it over to the child porn team in Boise." David shuddered. "One less piece of scum on the streets, preying on kids. He's not our guy."

Don frowned. "I'd like to say that we're making progress, guys, but this is like saying 'we're not moving backward any more'. We're eliminating potentials, but we're not coming up with probables." He indicated his own report. "Not a chance that Serita Tucker is a suspect. I didn't meet her, but neighbors say that her weight hovers between three hundred and hide-the-roast-here-she-comes."

"That bad?"

"Let's just say I didn't mind missing the lady of the house." Don's grimace was bleak. "There's no possible way that she could have climbed up to the top of the museum, lowered herself on a rope to the window, climbed inside and then reversed the process to get away with the painting. Don't see it happening, guys."

Colby snorted. "Not at three hundred pounds plus." He paused. "What did she want the electronics for? Or should I even ask?"

Don shook his head. "Some sort of timing thing. She's trying to lose weight; has her fridge padlocked, and it will only open at certain times of the day."

"Creative," was Colby's only comment. He leaned back in his chair. "We got three more leads from your little Mindy."

"She's not mine. Trust me on this one, Colby."

Colby ignored his team leader's protest. "Three more leads, and only one is here in L.A." He brightened. "This one is in Dallas. I can fly out there, Don, and be back in a day or so."

"That wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that the Cowboys have a home game this week end, would it?"

"Aw, c'mon, Don. You take all the fun out of life."

"Since you're tired of wearing out your shoe leather, you can research 'em from right here, on line," Don instructed, suppressing the grin. He glanced at the other two possibilities. "David, you and I will stretch our legs and check out this Ms. Melinda Matouska, in Santa Ana."

"Sounds good to me." David too stretched his arms, grabbing his jacket. "What about this last one? This Duckett woman?"

"If we come up blank with the other two, we'll hike out to see her. She's up in the mountains somewhere; MapQuest says something like two hours away by car, and I'm thinking more like three. I did a little baseline computer background on her, and I'm not coming up with anything. Doesn't even have any parking tickets that I could find. I'm hoping it's not her," Don added. "It'll take a while to rule her out. But with three paintings missing, we've got to grab at everything."

* * *

"Much better," Megan announced a couple of hours later. A fire in the fireplace was sending out a symphony of crackling along with much needed heat, and the quartet had changed into dry clothes, their wet ones hung from the inoperative chandelier in the Dining Hall to dry. A few hours work had turned a portion of the Great Hall into an area fit for human occupation with light provided by the fireplace and nothing else. Moving the curtains back hadn't helped; the storm outside continued to block any afternoon sun from approaching the interior. Charlie had found a broom in the back hall closet and had swept out enough of the dust so that Larry was no longer sneezing at random moments.

"I must apologize for the inadequacy of the accommodations," Larry started to say. "When I envisioned this outing, I had imagined comfortable surroundings at a nearby bed and breakfast with an elegant tea service, not this…this…" Words failed him, and he gestured at the faded furniture.

"Actually, I think this is all kind of fun," Megan told him, a small smile playing over her lips. "I mean, who else gets to say that they spent the night in a haunted castle?"

"Yes, well, about that—"

"Isn't that what that nice Ms. Ferres said?" Amita asked, a twinkle in her eye. "That this place is haunted? Wonder who haunts it?"

"With my luck, it would be Cousin Isabel." Larry shuddered. "No, more likely the tale is of the ghosts of the Perrin brothers, a small gang from the Twenties that were noted for robbing small banks and getting away with equally small loots. I understand that they went broke through sheer stupidity."

"They lived here?" Charlie's curiosity surfaced. "In this house?"

"Not exactly. The story that was handed down was that their mother was a housekeeper for the family who owned the place at the time; the family's name escapes me. But the gang stayed on the property, hiding the small remainder of their ill-gotten gains, living off of the land until the law finally apprehended them. They all perished in jail of old age, including the housekeeper who was implicated by nature of knowing where her sons hid the resultant monies. The original family was much put out by the necessity of finding another housekeeper who would work as cheaply as Mrs. Perrin and frequently voiced their discontent in the local newspaper. They, too, eventually became impoverished and sold the mansion to cover numerous debts."

"They never found where the Perrin gang hid their loot?" Amita asked.

"No, and it's widely believed that there was none. Believe me, Amita, children from this town have scoured these hills, looking into caves and digging into grottoes in the hopes of discovering the money's whereabouts. The more sensible among us, realizing that the brothers lived in poverty even before their capture, doubt that there is any 'loot' to be found."

"Oh, c'mon, Larry," Charlie wheedled. "Are you going to tell me that you've never hiked through these woods, looking for buried treasure?"

Larry flushed. "I was quite young at the time, and, I must admit, foolish. It was before I discovered the genius of Copernicus."

"So you did go after buried treasure," Megan beamed. "I knew you had it in you, Larry. What did you find?"

"An intense and on-going fascination with the stars," Larry assured her, "one that has yet to wane. I find the cosmos to be far more to my liking that any meager treasure secreted by an inept and incompetent band of thieves. No, Megan, except for my star-gazing, the only other thing that I found was an Indian arrowhead which later, when I presented it quite proudly to the local museum, turned out to be a modern rendition by the local boy scout troop. The curator was quite kind to me," Larry said wistfully. "He was complimentary that I'd found it at all; seemed to think that a modern arrowhead was as rare or more than those of a more antiquitous nature, and advised me to hang onto the piece. I've always suspected that he was pulling my leg," Larry added, letting his voice trail off forlornly.

"So, what's the ghost story?" Amita wanted to know. "Do they ride around on horseback, dressed in white bed sheets?"

"That's approximately correct," Larry said. "If you add in a healthy dollop of gunfire, you will have surmised the local legend quite accurately. I'm afraid the tale isn't much for originality," he told them dolefully.

"Never mind," Charlie consoled him. "I think we've got enough of a ghost story right here. Larry, I never knew that you had such an interesting family. A castle!"

"More of a mansion," Larry corrected, "and, right now, an eye-sore."

_Bang!_

All four of them jumped.

"What was that?" Amita was the first to find her voice.

"A window, blowing in," Charlie guessed. "A house this old, and abandoned? It could be anything."

"We'd better investigate," Megan urged. "What, we shouldn't check it out? This is Larry's house now. If he wants to sell it and get more than a couple of dollars, it needs to be in good shape, not water-logged from a broken window."

"After two years of abandonment, it's probably as damaged as it's going to get," was Charlie's opinion.

"And the windows were shut on the bedrooms that we cleaned up," Amita added nervously. "I vote for staying right here where it's warm."

A moan seeped into the Great Hall. It was a moan with a distinctly human sound to it, quite at odds with their surroundings but entirely within the realm of the ghost story they had just discussed.

"What was that?" Amita nearly jumped out of her skin, looking around.

"The wind," Larry said, looking unconvinced at his own words. "The windows are leaky. The air is blowing through."

Charlie snugged an arm around Amita. "The place is haunted. It's supposed to have spooky noises, right?"

"Charlie!"

Charlie seemed completely unmoved by the eerie sound. "What would a haunted house be without a ghost? I'll tell you," and he leaned forward, "_not haunted_." He sat back, grinning. "What's for dinner?"

Larry sighed. "I suppose it would be too much to hope for that the majority of foodstuffs that you purchased in town were of a uniform color."

"Nope. Not even of the same consistency. How do you feel about burning hotdogs on a stick in the fireplace?"

"They aren't white," Larry pointed out.

"Quite right. We also got marshmallows. Feel like a sugar rush?"

The next sound should have been a second doleful sigh from the physicist. It, however, was drowned out by Megan's gasp.

"What was that?"

"What was what?" Charlie craned his head around.

"There! In the window! I saw it!"

"Saw what?" Amita was grabbing onto Charlie's arm by now.

"It was a face," Megan said. That was a first: there was fear in her voice. Charlie didn't think that he'd ever heard Megan actually _afraid_. "I saw a face." She took a deep breath. "I know this sounds crazy, but I saw a face and it was covered with hair. And the guy was big."

"Maybe we ought to let him in. It's still raining out." Charlie started to get up.

"Are you crazy?" Megan wanted to know. "Nobody's out on a night like this. Nobody reasonable, that is. Do _not_ open the door," she insisted, reaching for her handbag.

Larry knew what she carried in that handbag, knew that it never left her possession. And he knew, as they all did, that Megan was an expert shot with what was in her handbag. Don had been boasting about her scores just last week. _Had_ boasted about it where Larry could hear him, just to make sure that Larry got the message, as if anyone in their right mind could ever conceive of Larry behaving in a less than gentlemanly fashion toward Megan. "It does seem somewhat pointless to be concerned about opening the door," he pointed out. "It's not as if the lock is in working condition. As I recall, when we entered, not only did the doorknob fall off in my hand but the locking mechanism dropped onto my foot. Had I not been wearing shoes, I would now be the somewhat less than proud owner of a large bruise."

"Anything out there looking like that," Amita said darkly, "wouldn't need to worry about a lock keeping them out."

Charlie sighed, giving in. "Does anyone else think this is ridiculous? I realize that it's October and that Halloween is approaching, and this is supposedly a haunted castle in the dark woods, but come on! Larry, where's the physics in this? Is there any evidence that ghosts exist?"

"There are many objects in the universe for which there is little objective evidence, Charles," Larry replied. "Given the quantity of people who have reputedly seen one or more ghosts, I am not yet willing to dismiss the concept out of hand."

"Charlatans, all of them."

"Some, indubitably, Charles. Others, an honest mistake or a fantasy born of fear or boredom. But there is also anecdotal data that warrants further rational study."

"And, in the meantime, I'll hang onto my gun," Megan announced, tucking the handgun into her waistband for easier access. "It doesn't matter if it's supernatural or something more mundane. A girl needs to look out for herself." Larry winced, shooting Charlie an unreadable yet dark glare.

"You're letting your imagination run away with you," Charlie insisted. "We heard a moan. In the light of day—not a rainy day, I mean—we're going to find out that it was the wind whistling through a leaky window and that all the windows need to be replaced before Larry can sell this place. The face at the window will turn out to be a branch being pushed by the wind, looking like two eyes, a nose, and a mouth." He got up off of the sofa, ignoring the dust that puffed up alongside. "Give me a hand, Amita? If we don't start roasting those hotdogs now, the fire in the fireplace will die down and I am not looking forward to trying to find dry wood outside in that downpour."


	4. Stormy Night 4

Don ducked down behind the Suburban. Another bullet whistled past his head, all but putting a part in his hair where it shouldn't be. "Call for back up!" he yelled to David.

"Already on their way. Them _and_ the LAPD SWAT team."

"Think it'll be enough?"

David considered. There was lead coming out of every orifice in the house, more than should be in a quiet suburban home in one of the prettier sections of town. Not only was it illegal, it just wasn't _nice!_ "How many shooters do you think they have?"

"I counted at least six, maybe more. I know I knocked off two."

"Me, too. That makes a minimum of ten, when we started. What do you think she's got in there, that she's so eager that we not find out?"

"Drugs, maybe? Meth lab?"

"Possibly." David ducked again in reflex when a long nosed barrel poked out an upstairs window in a crash of glass shards, seeking another spot to aim at the two FBI agents. "I sure hope that back-up gets here soon. You want to think about a strategic retreat?"

Don chanced looking around the corner of the Suburban. "Believe me, I'm considering it." Another bullet arrowed past. "There's only two of us, and too many of them. Think they know it's just you and me?"

"Nope. If they did, they'd be all over us."

"Yeah." Don took a deep breath, held it, and flashed around the Suburban again to fire off a couple. Not expecting to _hit_ anything, just enough to remind the people on the inside that there were Federal agents on the outside. "Who the hell is Melinda Matouska and why is she and her friends giving us such a hot reception?"

"What say we wait for _our_ friends to arrive and help us ask? Damn!" David finished as a bullet dug a hole in the concrete beside him. A shower of dust and shrapnel shattered into the air. David pulled his hand back to his side, shaking it. "Damn, that was close."

Don spared him a glance. "You're bleeding. You okay?"

"Yeah. Just a scratch."

"Don't go getting any more scratches," Don advised. "I can't afford to give anyone any time off, not with Megan on vacation. Wait your turn."

"Excellent. I'll ask those people inside to stop shooting until she comes back."

How the hell did this get so out of control? With Colby stuck on the computer, trying to track down the various techno-toys used to break into the art museum, Don had taken David along for a nice little quiet chat with one Ms. Melinda Matouska. It was only supposed to be a chat, nothing more. There hadn't been a clue. A quick computer scan had turned up nothing more than a parking violation six years ago. Even the house that Ms. Matouska lived in didn't warrant this sort of warfare. It was one of those tiny suburban households with a white picket fence along one side that did nothing to block anything or anyone in or out, the fence just there for decoration. There was a rose bush on the corner of the house, for cripes' sake! It was covered with yellow-orange flowers! People just didn't shoot around a rose bush in bloom!

Six windows in the front, and each of 'em held a man with a gun. Well, maybe one or two of the shooters were women, but Don was making his point: they were in trouble. "I hear sirens," he said, hoping it wasn't just the ringing in his ears. No, it really was a symphony of sirens, all headed in this direction.

The people inside heard the sirens, too. Don and David knew that, because the quantity of bullets being aimed at them took a sharp increase and the amount of shouting inside the house rose exponentially. _Damn, I didn't think I remembered what 'exponentially' meant. See what kind of effect my brother has on me, even when he's not around?_

"I think they're trying to get out the back door," he said, keeping his back against the Suburban for protection. "I think they're going to try to run."

"We can't question them if they run, Don."

"That was my thought, too."

"I suppose you want to try to stop them, right?"

"You're reading my mind, David."

"Our back-up won't get here in time. There's just two of us."

"You're reading the _next_ chapter in my mind."

"I don't like the ending, Don. The climax is where one of us goes around to the back to convince the antagonists not to leave. If they decide to leave in a rush, they'll mow one of us down."

"If they escape, we may lose our only clue to the stolen Michelette," Don pointed out.

"Don, it's a really ugly painting."

"Yeah, but it's a really _expensive _ugly painting," Don replied. "You want the front or the back?"

"They're both bad."

"I'll flip you for it. Heads, I take the back. Tails, it's all yours." Don reached into his pocket, wincing as another bullet ended its life on the pavement not six inches from his shoes. "This is my lucky penny." He tossed the bronze colored coin into the air, watching it tumble its way down to arrive next to the now flattened and spent bullet. "Damn. Heads." He snatched up the penny, slipping it back into his pocket. "Not so lucky, I guess," he grumbled. "Cover me, on three."

Deep breath. Wait for David to jump up, handgun blazing for all its puny worth. Run like he was heading home, trying to beat the ball to home plate when the outfielder was throwing it in at ninety miles per hour and Don was pushing for fifteen mph.

Bullets following him, dodging, shoulder-rolling into that damn rose bush and coming up with thorns but safe against the side wall of the house. _At least it smelled good_, was Don's thought. _Am I crazy, or what?_

Half way there to the back yard. Don eased himself to the corner of the house, peering cautiously around the edge, pulling back after a quick glimpse of what was there. Good points: there was fence around the back yard, something that would delay Matouska and the rest until help arrived. Bad points: the fence wasn't that tall. One good leap, and a bunch of suspects would be fleeing into the adjoining back yard and off into the next street over and from there into the wilds of urban Los Angeles. _Gotta keep 'em inside_. Don risked another glimpse, looking for cover.

And found it. _Any port in a storm_, he thought. _But anyone who laughs gets the next all night surveillance detail. Without a coffee budget!_

Don ran to the cover he'd identified: a young girl's playhouse, all pink and frilly with plastic flowers. There was an open window to look through, walls to hide behind. There was even a dolly sitting in a miniature highchair, waiting for some little girl to come in and feed her and brush out the bugs hiding in her ratty blonde hair. It wasn't much to hide behind, but it would do. He fired off another round.

It worked. The body that came to the back door of the house drew back in a hurry, and the shouts from inside grew louder and angrier. The easy escape route wasn't looking quite so easy any more for the suspects inside.

Don took a moment to shove in another round of bullets into his gun. _Damn, last clip. Better make it last_. He squeezed off another single shot, took out the lantern-like light hanging by the door, making the glass shatter and scatter all around. _Where's the back-up?_

_Shit, where __is__ the back-up?_ That thought was tinged with terror as a crowd of large and armed people surged from the back door. _Beat 'em back, Eppes, if you want to walk away from this shoot out!_

He aimed carefully. Didn't want to shoot anybody, not unless he had to. Dead people were really tough to interrogate. And it was looking more and more like he had to.

Some kid, scarcely out of his teens, was the first to burst out from the back door, screaming and waving a handgun around like it was supposed to impress someone. Bullets were moving in almost every direction; none of which, fortunately, were Don's. _Broad side of a barn_, went through Don's mind. A single bullet parted the kid's dreds and sent him scurrying to the ground. Don decided on the spot to let someone else handle the kid. He'd probably wet his pants in fear.

Don spared a moment for a call for help. "David, I've got company back here, and they're bringing lovely parting gifts!"

"Got my own party in front, Don! Where's the damn back up we called for? They down-loading from MapQuest?"

Number two emerging from the house was scarier. His weapon of choice was an automatic something-or-other. Don didn't bother to try to identify it. It was big and it was throwing a lot of lead and Don needed it shut down _now_. He took careful aim, pretending that it was one of the bull-eyes sliding across the line at the firing range; moving target. _Don't think about the flesh and blood holding onto the gun. Sight onto the weapon, fasten onto the dark metal in your sights.. Aim, squeeze gently. Feel your finger caress the trigger_.

Scream from the man behind the target. Throw the weapon onto the ground. Shriek in pain, holding onto a damaged hand now dripping scary red stuff. Don didn't have time to admire his handiwork. A woman was barreling out, her own weapon solid in her fist. _Where was that back-up? The sirens were loud enough_.

_Time to use up the clip_. It was either that, or use up whatever was left of his nine lives. Don huddled down behind the pink fake petunia in the little plastic flower box hooked onto the edge of the 'windowsill' of the playhouse, hoping that the bullets wouldn't tear through the plastic like a hot knife through butter in a cheap detective novel. He popped up to put out three shots, trying to force them back into the house—

"FBI! Throw down your weapons!"

Damn, but that SWAT team looked good coming around the corner of the house.

* * *

"Exploring," Charlie insisted. "That's what we came up here for, isn't it? To investigate Larry's new home?"

"Inheritance, Charles, inheritance. I shudder to consider this as a 'home'."

"And it's dark, and the flashlight batteries won't last forever," Megan pointed out. "I vote we wait until morning."

"We're wasting time," was Charlie's reply. "We've only got a few days here before we have to get back to CalSci. Don't you want to find out what's here?"

"Frankly, no—"

"Charlie's right," Amita had to admit. "And I really do have a lecture to pull together before Monday. We should take advantage of the time that we have. We can get more flashlight batteries in the morning if we need to. The road should dry out by mid-morning. The rain is supposed to stop some time during the night." She stood up, taking Charlie's hand. "There were some really neat things upstairs when Megan and I checked out the bedrooms earlier."

"We should stay together," was Megan's thought.

"This is a 'haunted house'," Charlie teased. "Afraid?"

"Cautious. That was a face that I saw at the window, Charlie, even if you don't want to believe me. We should stay together," Megan repeated.

"We'll stay in voice contact. We won't be that far apart," Charlie said. "We can still shout. Amita and I will explore upstairs, and we'll leave the two of you down here." He grinned. "I'll make a concession. We'll all stay together when we hit the basement. A house this old, out here? I'll bet the bugs are as big as wolves. Then we'll definitely need your gun!" Grinning, he followed Amita up the stairs, avoiding the tread that threatened to collapse beneath his weight.

Larry looked at Megan. Megan looked at Larry, and shrugged. She patted her waistband, the handgun securely held by the fabric. "Let's go."

Larry sighed. "Would mademoiselle care to join me in the solarium?" he asked, offering his arm.

Megan slipped her hand through his, and laughed. If the sound was a trifle brittle, no one commented. "I thought you'd never ask."

The solarium had long since been overgrown with weeds, those weeds growing out of necessity from the planters still placed haphazardly around the large room. It was colder there than the rest of the fireplace-warmed house, with a corner of one window cracked and the limb of a spider plant creeping out toward daylight and freedom. A large cactus in the corner had died a slow death from dehydration—a remarkable feat, Larry noted, considering that cacti were noted for their ability to withstand long periods of drought. It seemed that Larry's late cousin had been determined to put that ability to the test. There were several intimate loveseats tucked indiscriminately around the exterior of the room but the flashlight discovered that some of the local field mice had realized the superior insulation qualities of the cushion stuffing and had re-located the material to places best known only to exterminators.

"A cat," Megan said. "This place needs a cat, to get rid of the mice."

"Perhaps two or three," Larry agreed, and sneezed at the mere thought of the allergy-provoking creatures. "I suspect reclaiming this area for human habitation will be a long term project. I've known whole galaxies to be discovered in less amount of time," he added darkly.

"This would be nice in the moonlight," Megan offered, trying to turn the mood around. "Probably pretty in the day time."

"Which this clearly is not, despite what our timepieces insist." Larry looked around, seeking something of value in this remote area of the house, something to suggest that demolition wasn't the only option. "As far as restoration, I suspect wholesale defoliage would be the optimal solution prior to any serious undertaking in this greenhouse."

Megan had to agree. "I wonder if there's a horticultural society in the area? I bet they'd be excited to show their orchids and such in a place like this once it was cleaned up a bit."

_Crash!_

A window shattered. Rain and sticks blew in. Megan jumped back—and closer into Larry's arms.

"Faugh!" Larry pulled back from the mess, but kept his arms around Megan. One of the benches prevented him from moving back any further, and he debated drawing her down to sit beside him. The sheer quantity of dirt and disrepair dissuaded him. "What a time for this to occur! And winter will be coming on within a matter of weeks!"

"Larry, look out there!" Megan suddenly yelled.

This time Larry saw it, too.

Glowing yellow, malevolent eyes. A large, gorilla-shaped body looming in the trees, black against the forest. Large teeth that somehow managed to be seen distinctly in the dim light of the storm-drenched afternoon.

And it was altogether terrifying.

* * *

Holding hands, for Professors Eppes and Ramajuan, was not an action that they commonly performed, given their respective positions. While it was quite appropriate for _undergraduates_ to indulge in such displays of affection at any and/or all times—before, during, and after class—Distinguished Scholars were clearly above such Mundane Acts.

Not only that, Charlie wasn't quite sure of how Amita would take it.

On the other hand—pun not intended—this wasn't CalSci and they weren't here as professors and nobody was around to tell on them and Charlie could always say it was because some of the treads on the staircase were a little rickety and he wanted to prevent Amita from a misstep that would plunge her and maybe him to the basement and _dammit_ he would really like to feel her hand tucked into his. Deep breath after a run on sentence without any commas.

Yeah, that would work.

Next problem: how to do it? Underhand or overhand approach? There didn't seem to be any appropriate theories on which method, statistically, was the best option. Charlie was more than ready to admit—privately, to himself, and not to anyone else—that his experience in this arena was somewhat limited. _Witness the fact that your dates all seem to end up discussing how Low Flow Theory applies to the latest FBI case, Eppes. You gotta get a life. That's what Dad is always saying. That, and then griping about the lack of grandkids._

_Try for smooth_. "Watch that step," Charlie said, picking any one of the steps with multiple cracks at random, and—_big moment, here!_—holding out his hand. Let Amita decide how to hold on. Offer her the choice. Dodge the problem entirely.

Amita came through. Clearly her post-graduate education had included the topic of How To Make the Geek Math Professor Feel Good. She took his hand. _Yes!_ Charlie had the distinct impression that she didn't really need to, but that _'need'_ wasn't the operative word. _'Want'_ did just fine. And Charlie really _wanted_ to hold Amita's hand. He grinned.

"This is a really cool place," she commented, looking around, not taking her fingers from his grasp once the—_ahem!_—dangerous staircase had been successfully negotiated. "I still can't believe that Larry just 'inherited' it. Things like that only happen in movies." She used her free hand to rub a finger along the edge of a large portrait. The fat old man with the Elizabethan collar leered down at her through the dust and cobwebs, his orange clothing making him seem like a pumpkin hoisted out of the patch just in time for Halloween. The gilt on the frame shone out once the covering dirt had been removed, glinting in the light of the flash. "All right, I have to admit," she said. "This may be an ancestor of Larry's, but this is a truly ugly painting."

Charlie had to agree. "Looks nothing like Larry," he said. He gestured to the next portrait down the hall. "This one, on the other hand, has a more similar look." He smirked. "Ever see those 'Ghost-Buster' movies? This painting looks like one of the demons." He put the flashlight to his chin, to make the shadows appear on his face. "The guy in the painting could be 'Fleinhardt the Evil One', luring us to his lair for unspeakable purposes."

"The only time Larry's purpose is unspeakable is when he hasn't thought of it yet," Amita returned, unimpressed by Charlie's theatrics. "Larry can say something about anything and in a way that makes you wonder if he said anything at all." She looked up and down the hall on the second floor. Not only were there paintings, but here and there a sculpture sat propped on a table in a corner or a niche. "His cousin must have had a thing for paintings and art. I wonder if any of this is worth anything. There's a lot of it."

"Hm. Maybe." Charlie paused to examine the small white porcelain figure in front of him, his attention caught. It too was dusty, but the dirt easily blew off to leave a glistening sheen behind. The girl in a flowing Grecian garb seemed to almost dance with stone-encased life, her eyes twinkling though there was no color beyond white to mar the tiny perfection of the figure. "I'm no expert, but this really looks well done. A local artist, maybe?"

"Maybe." Amita leaned over to inspect it. She picked it up, looking at the bottom for any identifying marks. "There's something here. Bring the flash closer." They both peered at it. Charlie could smell the faint scent of something floral in her hair, something nice that he associated with Amita. He inhaled, trying to keep his attention on the statue that she held and failing utterly.

Amita almost had her nose to the piece. "There's something here, but I can't make it out in the dark. Maybe tomorrow we can look again. Or persuade Larry to take it back to L.A. for a serious appraisal. This looks really nice, as in really expensive." She glanced back up at the line of art before them. "A lot of these things look fine. Larry may have stumbled into something a lot more interesting than we thought."

"Um." Charlie thought that _Amita_ was a lot more interesting than any old painting of a dead guy. Or a statue of a dead dancer.

"There was another piece in here, one that looked nicer," Amita said. She led Charlie into one of the bedrooms, and lit one of the fat candles that seemed to dot the entire house, tucking the matchbook back into her pocket and holding up the candle. The flickering light added a warm glow to Charlie's flashlight beam. "Megan and I found it when we were tidying up a couple of rooms to sleep in tonight." She pushed open the door to the bedroom, showing Charlie a large canopied bed. Most of the cobwebs had been swept away, leaving only a few unreachable ones in the upper corners of the tall ceiling. Some of the remaining spiders seemed to smirk at Amita: _see? You missed us._

Amita had unrolled the blankets from a chest in the corner, shaking them out earlier and tossing them onto the bed. She set the candle down onto the stand beside the bed. "Thank goodness that the mice didn't get to these linens," she mentioned. "They attacked the things downstairs in the Great Room, but they seemed to leave the upstairs alone. It's only been two years since Larry's cousin passed away, and I shudder to think how much damage would have been done if he hadn't come up now. As it is, this place really stinks." She handed him a candle. "Here, light some more of these. It will drive away the odor, so we can sleep without waking up thinking that we've landed in a garbage dump."

"This is looking almost cozy," Charlie told her, lighting another couple of the fat white candles that he found. _Larry's cousin must have had the same idea; if it smelled, light a candle to mask the smell. She certainly had enough of them_. To his surprise, Charlie found himself almost liking the scent. _It smells a bit like Amita's hair_, he realized, deciding that that was why he liked it.

_Crash!_

_Scream!_

"That was Megan!" Amita spun around.

"Maybe Larry."

"Maybe Larry," Amita admitted, her eyes big with fear.

"Stay here," Charlie told her. "I'll go and investigate." He handed her the flashlight, picking up a smaller candle and lighting it from the first for his own source of photons. "I'll be right back."

"I'm going with you," she told him.

"Something probably just dropped. I'm sure they're okay," Charlie said, trying to put reassurance into his voice. "With all these candles lit, you should stay here to make sure that nothing falls over and sets Larry's new mansion on fire. Besides, Megan's got her gun. Nothing is going to try anything serious with her."

"But did she pack silver bullets?" Amita was only half-joking.

"Silver bullets? Like for were-wolves? Superstition, Amita."

"Right. I'm coming with you, Charlie. Something bad might have happened to them." New decision, based on irrational fear of creatures that go bump-in-the-night. It had nothing to do with Larry and Megan. _If I stay here alone, something bad might happen to me!_

"It's probably nothing," Charlie tried to convince her. "Maybe something fell over, something that they weren't expecting. You can't leave a lit candle up here," he pointed out. "I'll be right back. Or I'll call if there's anything serious," he told her. "Really. Stay right here. It's safe here."

"Right." The half-smile Amita produced was more unhappy than effective. "I'll see if I can't clear away a few more of the cobwebs."

"Really liking that idea," Charlie grinned. "The thought of waking up with a spider dangling over my head…"

Amita shuddered. "Hand me that broom. The one with the _long_ handle."

* * *

"You," and Don was too irate and upset and adrenalin-ized to _sit_ on the metal chair in the interrogation chamber, "are in a hell of a lot of trouble."

Melinda Matouska _was_ sitting on a metal chair, mostly because the female guard, who was now standing grimly just outside in the hall, had slammed her there with a stern admonition not to get up unless told to do so. Don found himself automatically taking notes on the suspect: mid-twenties, redhead out of a bottle because the color didn't match either her eyebrows or her skin tone with a streak of green dye painted along one strip of hair over her ear. There was only one dangling safety pin through the hole in her ear; the other had presumably been lost in the scuffle of applying handcuffs while listening to her scream filthy names at them. Smaller silver studs dotted the four other holes in her ears, and the ring through her nose boasted a cheap black upside down cross. Don chose not to bother looking for the stud through her tongue. _Gotta leave something for the prison guards to go after. Unless they want to let the local Big Bertha of San Quentin rip it out of her tongue. Ouch!_

The rest of Melinda's get-up was artfully classic: leather jacket now covered with backyard dirt, torn jeans, tee shirt with the words 'Bite Me' across her chest. _Another thing that I'm not gonna touch with a ten foot pole_. Heavy black army boots that didn't fit particularly well. Black mascara, pretending to be Goth. Remnants of red lipstick that mostly disappeared after eating a left-over slice of pizza that came from the thrown away boxes in the trash at the scene of the shoot out. Real pillar of society type, here.

Melinda looked at him, striving for boredom. It didn't quite come off. "So put me in jail and throw away the key," she sneered.

"Oh, I'm going to do that," Don assured her. "Question is, who else is the jail cell going to hold? Somebody your own size, maybe a little smaller, little bit weaker? Or somebody who gets off on a little S&M? Somebody, say, with like about two hundred pounds of muscle that she works on during exercise period in the gym at San Quentin? You're not much to look at, doll, and you're as skinny as a stick, but some of the mommas there like that sort of thing. Like to hear 'em squeal," he added, watching for a reaction.

It was there. Covered, but a flicker of fear came and went. Little Ms. Melinda wasn't as tough as she looked.

"I chew up bitches like that and spit 'em out." Melinda spit on the floor for emphasis.

_Definitely_ not as tough. A real street bitch would have looked mildly interested at the possibility of a little under the cover fun and enjoyed the pain that came along with it. Melinda's defiance suggested that underneath the black mascara lay a kid ready to crack. Don moved in for the kill.

"Of course," he mused, turning away just enough so that he could still see her face but not appear as though he was looking, "a little cooperation would go a long way. Not too far," he cautioned. "Judges aren't likely to be all that lenient with chicks shooting at Federal agents. Gives the wrong impression," he added slowly, as if thinking it over. "But, on the other hand, the warden over there is a friend of mine." _The warden is a friend of __every__ local cop and federal agent._ "He might be inclined to listen to me. If I had a reason to have a conversation with him."

He had just handed her a way out. But she had to make it look good. "Didn't think you had any friends."

"Just goes to show you how wrong you are." Don plunged in. "What were you and the Scooby Doo gang doing in there? Meth?"

"You gonna get me probation?"

Don snorted. "Your record? Shooting at me? Girly, count your blessings that I'm willing to talk to the warden." He leaned over the table for looming purposes. "You don't talk to me, I talk to the judge. And he isn't gonna like what I have to say. Hear me?" He dragged the chair around and dropped onto it. "Talk. What were you doing in that house?"

Melinda looked away, sullen. "Meth. Cooking it."

"You?"

"I flunked chemistry in high school," she sneered, as if that disqualified her on the grounds of stupidity. "Morrie and Jake, they're the cookers. The rest were just street bums that I hired to keep Morrie and Jake working."

"Who do you sell to?"

"Bosco."

That didn't please Don. Bosco had been put down supposedly for five to ten. _Guess my friend the warden forgot to tell me that Donnie Bosco got out on parole for good behavior. Or, to be honest, the memo could have crossed my desk and been buried under an avalanche of Charlie-math_. "He's back in business? Didn't think he was stupid enough to go back to his old ways."

"Stupid enough to make me enough money to hire a fancy lawyer to get me off."

_Oops. Little Melinda was trying to grow a spine. Back-breaking time._ "Nothing's gonna get you off, doll. You bought some heavy-duty electronics. What did you need it for?"

"Morrie and Jake used it for the cookers."

"Try again, Melinda. You don't use wireless bugs to cook meth. Why did you buy the Chromantic and the Wrachet 2000?"

Melinda blinked, and Don knew without a shadow of a doubt that Melinda was not the end user of the electronic toys. Someone with real tech-lust would always remember those names. Her face stayed carefully blank, with just a touch of defiance. This defiance, however, seemed less directed at Don and more at whoever had persuaded her to buy the toys and get her into this mess. " Bosco."

It had the ring of truth. "Why did he want them?"

"How should I know? He paid me to buy 'em."

"Make a guess."

"Sorry. All out of guesses."

"Guess I'm all out of kind words for the warden, too," Don reminded her.

She flushed. _Wow! She's still capable of a blush? Gives me faith that miracles can happen._ But she gave it up. "He's got this chick that he's bouncing, thinks she's doing some other guys on the side. He wanted to check on her. See what she's doing when he's not around."

Unfortunately, from what Don remembered of Bosco, that made sense. Bosco had gone down because his previous girlfriend had rolled on him, and she had rolled because he drove her crazy with his baseless accusations of infidelity. The moments came back to Don's memory: the previous girlfriend, terrified that Bosco would kill her, walking into FBI headquarters demanding protection and witness relocation in return for testimony. Win-win deal, with Bosco behind bars, the girl now living in South Dakota, and another commendation on Don's record books. But, right now, Don would have liked to have been able to tie Bosco to the theft of the museum painting.

He finished up the interview, trying for the tough guy act, but his heart wasn't really in it. Sure, it was good to shut down another meth lab and the kids over in the D.A.'s office would be pleased as punch with the unexpected gift as well as the opportunity to demonstrate yet again to the judge and society at large what a wonderful and upstanding citizen Bosco wasn't. But Don's current job was to find that damn ugly painting and return it to the museum. And this little slice of life hadn't helped.

David greeted him with an understanding sigh as he trudged back to his office. He lifted his shoulders. "One more lead left, Don: that Duckett woman, the one who lives up on the mountain."

Don plopped down into his chair. "Let's check it out."


	5. Stormy Night 5

It wasn't a gunshot, but it was something just as nerve-tingling: Megan's voice, harsh and commanding. It was her full-blown _'FBI Freeze!'_ mode. It meant something very bad was happening. Megan rarely over-reacted.

It was coming from the greenhouse. Or the ice-box, as Amita had whispered into Charlie's ear before following him up the staircase to the second floor. It couldn't be a greenhouse because it was too cold for anything to survive, now that autumn was coming into the California mountains with all the gentleness of a grizzly bear protecting her cubs.

And now it was a danger zone. It was Megan, reacting to something very bad, something that shouldn't be there. Charlie picked up the pace. No matter what it was, Megan and Larry would need help. Charlie ran toward the greenhouse.

He heard Megan's voice again: "You! Out there! Hands in the air!"

And Larry's voice: "What is it? What is it?"

Charlie burst into the room. Megan swung around, handgun clenched. Charlie jumped back, Megan herself pulling the gun back before it could go off. "Charlie! I almost shot you!" She again faced the other end of the room.

Charlie saw the broken window. "Guys?"

"There was something out there," Larry informed him tersely. "Something large and moving."

"A bear?"

"It was no bear." Megan was shaken, more shaken that Charlie had ever known her to be. "No bear ever looked like that."

"What was it?"

"I don't know." Megan was lying. She knew what it was, knew that she didn't want to believe what she knew it to be.

"Larry?"

Larry took refuge in scientific observation. "It was vaguely humanoid, Charles, but of larger proportions. It appeared to be covered in dark fur."

"A bear." It had to be. There was no other explanation.

"More humanoid than a bear." Of that, Larry was certain. "Its gait was likewise more human than that of a bear, even one ambulating on its hind legs."

"If it wasn't a bear, then what was it?" Charlie was honestly confused.

"Good question," Megan said grimly. "What say we wait until morning to find out? Remember that? Morning, with lots of sunshine and the ability to look at things clearly?"

The trio would have come to a consensus agreement, had they not been interrupted by a scream.

_Amita's_ scream.

* * *

"You sure that the search warrant will be waiting for us?" Don asked suspiciously. "Not that I don't like a nice drive in the mountains with the leaves turning, but this will be a great waste of taxpayer's dollars, not to mention hours of manpower time, if it doesn't come through."

He was just going through the motions of being a good boss. Don really didn't care if he wasted these hours. Getting out of the office with its desks and computers and deadlines was worth it. Breathing fresh mountain air was a bonus that he really liked. As much as he liked his job, there were times when being outside was the best part.

And today, the outside was doing its best to cooperate. Sure, there were clouds where they were headed, but those were up top on the mountainside and Don and David and Colby hadn't gotten there yet. Right now there was bright sunlight filtering down through the red and orange leaves, birds were singing, and there was a bite in the air that promised a really good skiing season to come. It was the type of day that set the blood to singing along with those birds. Don kept the windows down despite the chill in the air, just to drink in the sights and sounds, and neither David nor Colby objected.

"Already in the works, Don," David reassured him. "Judge Judy promised to sign it and fax it through as soon as her secretary came back from a long lunch. It should be waiting for us in the local police station."

"How long a lunch?" Colby had his own suspicions. "Did you offer to hunt the secretary down? We could have taken the paper with us."

"Dude, there are some things that a man has no right to know. Haven't you heard the rumors about that secretary and her significant other?"

"Oh. You mean—_her_?"

"Yeah. _Her_."

"Ugh." Colby leaned back against the seat. "Must be a damn good secretary."

"Long as she gets the warrant where it needs to be, she can spend her lunch break where ever she sees fit." Don swerved the car to avoid a particularly stupid squirrel. "And, knowing Judge Judy Baxter, she _is_ a damn good secretary. She wouldn't have lasted with the judge if she weren't."

David developed a small lift at one corner of his mouth. "No matter what her sexual preferences. Bottom line," he added, "the warrant should be at the town police chief's office when we get there. We can pick it up, then go see how cooperative the suspect is before we decide whether or not to use it."

Colby stared out the window. "I hope she gives us a hard time."

"Yeah? Why's that?"

Big grin. "Only the wicked minded have something to fear from the FBI. The more hassle, the more chance we have of her being our suspect."

"Yeah, but that means we're one step closer to seeing that ugly mother of a painting in real life."

Colby's face froze. "Oh. Right." He glanced out through the window again. "You don't have to drive so fast, Don."

* * *

"Amita!" Charlie's feet were in motion before the echoes of the scream vanished, Megan and Larry on his heels. The dangerous cracks in the risers of the staircase went ignored this time; Charlie was leaping them three at a time. Megan and Larry were slightly more circumspect but no less anxious—or delayed.

"Amita!" Charlie yelled.

"Charlie! In here!" There was no mistaking the terror in her voice.

Charlie burst into the room. Amita stood in the center, a blanket in her hands, shaking like a leaf. It was dark: the candles had been blown out, and somehow Charlie didn't think that Amita had done it herself. The broken window, wind whistling in, gave him a very solid clue in that department. "Amita?"

"There was something in here!"

Charlie took a quick look at the broken window and leaped to a conclusion. "Some bird. It flew into the window in the dark, breaking the glass. It's gone."

"No, Charlie! There was something here!" Amita insisted, her eyes wide with fear. "It flew through the room and out into the night! Charlie, I am not crazy, but I saw a ghost!"

"A ghost?" Charlie tried hard to keep the skepticism out of his voice. He settled taking her around the shoulders, trying to calm her down. "A ghost," he repeated, going for the I-know-you-saw-_something_ pitch. "What did it look like?"

"Don't humor me!" she snapped back. "I know what I saw, and it looked like a ghost, Charlie!"

Megan and Larry arrived at the doorway. "A ghost?"

"Yes, a ghost!" Amita wasn't ready to calm down. "It was big, and white, and I could see through it."

Megan sniffed. "I smell something. Something odd." She moved forward into the room.

"I wasn't aware that ghosts had an odor," Larry observed, trying to follow the FBI agent's lead.

"I wasn't aware that ghosts had _reality_." The comment was out before Charlie could censor it.

"I saw it!" Amita pulled away from him.

"I didn't mean that the way it sounded—"

"I'll bet!"

"She saw something," Megan said, forcing calm into her voice. "I definitely smell something."

"As do I," Larry added.

"And me," Charlie put in hurriedly, trying to back track. "There was definitely something here."

"Thank you for that, at least!"

"And it wasn't a ghost that broke this window." Megan moved over to the shattered pane. "The glass broke outward. Look, there are the shards on the ground below."

"What?" Larry joined her at looking out, ignoring the cold air forcing its way inside. The physicist came on point. "This means that something from inside the room broke the window during its egress."

Charlie tugged Amita over to look, trying to make up for lost ground. "It also means that there was something physical in this room. Something with both a scent and a solid form. Something strong enough, and with enough force to crash through this window. Last I heard, ghosts didn't qualify on any of those counts." He sniffed. "You're right. I do smell something. What is it?"

"Not perfume, that's for certain. And not from the candles." Megan circled around, trying to determine where the scent was coming from. "The smell is fading; I can barely tell it was here. This is eerie. What's going on here? Is this place deserted or not?"

"It certainly ought to be. Cousin Isabel willed it to me, and no one ought to have been staying here during the two years while the will was in probate," Larry told her. "That's what the lawyers said."

"And it was dirty enough when we walked in to make us assume that it hadn't been lived in for those two years." Megan started thinking, going into FBI solving-the-case mode. "Amita, describe what you saw."

"I only saw it for a moment," Amita admitted. "Charlie left, and I started pulling the blankets out and shaking them to get the dirt off. I smelled something, something that didn't smell good, and then I saw something out of the corner of my eye."

"And it looked like—?" Megan prompted.

Amita flushed. "I couldn't tell for certain. I just caught a glimpse of it."

"And—?"

"A white blur. And I know this sounds silly, but I started to get dizzy. Then the ghost, or whatever it was, flew out through the window, breaking the glass. That's when I screamed. I was startled." She blinked.

"Amita?" Charlie stepped in, took hold of her again. "You're shaking."

"I—I don't feel so good," Amita said uncertainly. "I think I need to sit down." She staggered, reached for the bedpost for something to hang onto, clinging onto Charlie. Her eyes rolled up into the back of her head.

"Amita? Amita!" Charlie caught the girl in his arms. "Amita!"

"She fainted!" Larry exclaimed. "Here, lay her down on the bed, on top of the blankets. It must have been the shock!"

"Or whatever that smell was," Megan put in grimly. She sniffed again, cautiously. "Whatever it was, it's dissipating now." She turned to the other man. "Larry, I think we need to do a bit more investigating of this house of yours, and soon. Some _serious_ investigating."


	6. Stormy Night 6

"So much for the sunlight," Colby grumbled. "We're gonna be lucky not to get caught in a mudslide." The rain pelting down on the windshield of the big Suburban seemed to agree. Colby had to speak loudly in order to be heard above the noise.

Don nodded grimly, keeping his attention focused on the road, trying avoid the muddy ruts that might turn out to be deeper than advertised. Getting stuck in a ditch was definitely not what he'd had in mind when he proposed this outing. "This was supposed to be just a few hours outside of the office, tracking down a lead. What say we hole up somewhere, wait for the next sunny day?"

"We're just outside of Ferresville," David pointed out, scanning the map with his finger. "Let's find a place there. We can investigate the lead, and spend the night in a hotel if we need to. We've just got another mile or two to go, according to this map."

Colby still wasn't happy, and with good reason. "You certain that we're gonna be able to get there? These mountain roads aren't always paved, and I am _not_ looking forward to trekking out and leaving the truck behind."

"Neither am I, Colby, and it's my Suburban." Don understood the younger agent's concern. "Keep your eyes open for any place to light for the night. If it's close enough to our suspect, we'll chance an interview today but I'm not going to push our luck."

"There's the sign for Ferresville," David said, reading it as they passed. "'Entering Ferresville: Population: 13.' Decision time, Don. Left fork: town. Right fork: suspect's home. I _think_; these maps up in these parts aren't always the most accurate things."

"No contest: town." Don was definite on that subject. "We need the warrant; hopefully it's already at the police station." He peered up at the sky. There wasn't much of it: the clouds were low, and rain-filled, and spilling over with a vengeance. "And a hotel."

It didn't take long for Don to put them into the center of town, parking next to the pot hole in front of the town hall whose sign explained that they had also arrived at the community center and police station. It wasn't possible to put the Suburban in a spot where they wouldn't be jumping over a small lake doubling as a puddle as they crawled out of the vehicle, so Don didn't bother to try, grateful that he'd worn his old hiking boots rather than go for the urban agent look. David, who'd opted for upscale, threw him a dirty look that Don carefully ignored. _I told you it was the mountains. Was it my fault you thought 'ski resort'?_

Dingy. That was the operative word here: dingy. And gray. Muddy. Dismal. Run-down. Peeling. Muddy. And, by the way, _muddy_. Don was willing to ascribe a fair amount of the dinginess to the weather, but not all. The town elders could have spent the effort to repaint the building some time in the last decade and Don was willing to bet good money that the window in front had glass that dated back to the 1940's. The pavement was better classified as cobblestone, from a couple of centuries ago.

Not his problem. Don wanted to get the warrant, get the suspect—hopefully with a painless confession in one hand and the ugly painting in the other—and get back down the mountain in one piece in time for Sunday dinner. _This_ coming Sunday, not the one more than a week away. He led the other two inside, collars up against the driving rain, dashing inside and hoping that the small lake hadn't seeped into footwear. _That puddle was big enough for salmon to spawn in._

Once over the threshold, he shook himself, trying to get at least a small portion of the wet off before tracking footprints all the way to the police chief's office. Don looked up, hoping to see some office signs or perhaps a directory in the dim light grudgingly offered by the single bare bulb screwed into the ceiling. No such luck. Every door looked the same: dingy and closed.

David put into words what they were all three of them thinking: "if they've closed on account of the weather, why did they leave the front door unlocked?"

"Let's look a little further," Don suggested. "Maybe not everyone has gone home. You can't close a police station, right?"

There wasn't a better idea forthcoming, so they put the plan into action. Don rapped politely on one door, Colby the next. David was the one to have some luck, although, in retrospect, Don couldn't decide whether the luck was good or bad.

"What'cha want?"

"Someone's here," David called out to the other two, pushing his way inside. He greeted the woman behind the desk, the sign on her counter proclaiming her not only to be Ms. Violet Ferres, but the Town Clerk as well. "FBI, ma'am. Special Agents David Sinclair, Don Eppes, and Colby Granger. We phoned ahead to Police Chief Bernard," he added, hoping that she might have heard something through the grapevine. "He's expecting us."

"Izzat so? News to me. Bernie took a hike 'bout an hour ago, headed off home before the rain got too bad. Me, I live over the jail so's I don't have to go out in the rain." She peered at David. "You look like one of them city types. We're getting a whole bunch of you these days. You plannin' on over-runnin' the place? What're you here for?"

Don plastered a smile onto his face, hoping that it didn't look too false. "Federal Bureau of Investigation. We're investigating a robbery, ma'am. The lead took us in this direction. A warrant was supposed to have been faxed to Police Chief Bernard's office, waiting for us. Could you direct us there?"

"Didn't you listen? You deaf or somethin'? Bernie's gone for the day," she told him. "You might as well settle yourselves in for the night, too. Nobody's going anywhere in this weather. Hope you got some place warm to stay."

Don eased back into the routine. He'd dealt with plenty of these small town offices, back when he worked the New Mexico territory. He knew these types of people; they'd work their collective tails off for someone they respected but run you around in circles if you didn't meet up with their sense of 'good folks'.

"Well, no, ma'am, not yet. We were kind of hoping to do our business and then head back down to the mountain. You see," and he leaned on the desk just enough so as to seem confiding yet not intruding on the woman's 'space', "the people that pay my salary have told me to get my tail up here to investigate this lead. Me, I'd rather be uncovering terrorist plots and things of that sort, but you know how it is. There are times when it's just easier to shut up and do what they tell you instead of making a fuss over what's right. Take this, for example. Couldn't wait for a judge to sign the warrant properly. Nope; had to hop into my truck and head on up, get the thing faxed up here so we could serve it in the middle of a rain storm." Never mind that Don himself had decided on that plan. There were some things better left unsaid.

Ms. Violet Ferres nodded her head, agreeing that there were those people running things who simply didn't Understand the Bigger Picture. With that simple piece of conversation, Don had gone from one of those who Simply Didn't Understand to just plain folks. "Bet they didn't even give you a chance to pack a bag," she said.

Don nodded. "You got it," he replied. "So you can see why we need to hustle." He gestured to the inclement weather which had obligingly turned from a mere storm into the next coming of the Forty Day Flood. "Not looking forward to trying to get through that mess. You wouldn't happen to know if that warrant came through? Maybe sitting on the police chief's desk? Kind of like to get our business done and then put our feet up somewhere." Like in front of a fireplace, with dry clothes, maybe a football game on the tube. And, as if it were the most inconsequential thing in the world, he asked, "you wouldn't happen to be able to direct us to the Duckett place, would you? Got a couple of questions I need to ask."

_Snort_. Ms. Ferres peered at him through wire-rimmed frames. "You're not gonna be asking them anything tonight, Mister FBI Agent. Road's washed out toward the Duckett place. Even that monster truck of yours won't be able to get through. You'd end up walkin', 'bout another hour in the rain once your ve-hicle got stopped. And that's assuming you don't end up sliding down the mountain on your backside, getting them fancy clothes all muddy." That last aimed at David Sinclair, whose smile remained fixed in place. After all the undercover operations David had been in, maintaining a poker face was almost second nature.

Ms. Ferres rustled through the papers on her desk. "I got your warrant right here," she announced, handing it over to Don who, clearly, was the only one worth talking to. David and Colby were just the tagalongs. "But you ain't getting out to the Duckett place tonight. Where're you stayin'?"

Don too kept an easy smile plastered on his face. "I was kind of hoping that you might recommend a place," he lied. "Like I said, we were hoping to come up, get in and get out before we put anybody to the trouble of dealing with us."

Ms. Ferres cackled merrily. "Mister Government Man, there ain't no places around here _to _recommend! Last place closed up ten years ago. Nobody comes to Ferresville, not unless they've got something to get away from. You mean to tell me that you came all the way up the mountain, in the rain, with no place to stay? No camper, no nothing?"

"Looks that way," Colby grumbled under his breath to David.

"Where you expecting to spend the night? Nice warm and dry jail cell?"

"Wouldn't that be just great for our image?" David hissed back to Colby. _Ugly painting, rotten weather—give me a nice, friendly shoot-out any day!_

Ms. Ferres was clearly enjoying their predicament. "Getting lots of you lowland types around here today, all with the same problem. Got no place to hang your hat. No planning ahead, none of you."

That sounded like a straight line. Don obliged. "These other folks, where did they go? They staying someplace around here?"

"You might say that. That one man, the educated one—with a filthy mouth, I might add!—inherited old Isabel's place up the mountain 'bout a mile of two. It's not clean but it's dry, and it's got a fireplace. And a ghost or two," Violet added with a knowing smirk. "Him and his friends, they're gonna have an interesting night." She drew out the word 'interesting' with relish.

Don stared. "You're kidding." There was a coincidence out there, and, for once, it might work in Don's favor. He hadn't listened closely when Megan was talking about taking a couple of days off, but a few things had sunk in. Like 'Larry's cousin died and left him an old mansion' and 'it's somewhere up on a mountain a few hours from L.A.' and, most importantly, right _now_ was when Megan was on her vacation along with Larry and Charlie and Amita. And, no matter if the place didn't have electricity or heat, it was still dry and it had to be better than an unused dusty and grimy jail cell in the middle of nowhere.

Colby picked up on the more amusing part of Violet Ferres' discussion. "You say the place is haunted? Haunted by what?"

Violet leaned over the counter, eager to pull the leg of the 'city folk'. "Now, I can't rightly say, but some people say there's a were-wolf or two in the area. Seems like they like to hang around old Isabel's place."

"A were-wolf." The fixed smile on David's face grew a little more wooden. "How interesting."

"Yeah." She jostled her eyebrows, noting his disbelief and making a challenge of it. "That's what some folks say. Not that I've ever seen them, mind. I haven't been up to Isabel's place since she passed. But I've heard a few howls in my time, and not too long ago, neither." She shuffled a couple of papers together. "Now, I wouldn't want to be telling Government Men what to do, but I will let you know that Jeb Caldwell keeps a box or two of silver bullets in his store. Just in case somebody comes around who might need such an item." She sniffed. "Me, I'd head right back down the mountainside afore the rain washes the place out. Wouldn't have to bother with any silver bullets."

_Right_. Don could see the thought circulate through David's frontal lobes. _Silver bullets to sell to whatever sucker is willing to buy them._

There was another piece to that, and Don actually intended to purchase a box of those silver bullets, assuming that they wouldn't break his budget. Not that he expected to need the bullets themselves, but buying a couple would loosen the store clerk's tongue, and that was worth the expenditure.

"Thank you, ma'am," he said gravely, with all the consideration that the comment deserved. "I think stopping by the store might be just the thing. Could I trouble you for directions to Isabel's place? I'm hoping that they might be willing to accommodate us for the night. I'm assuming that the road that way hasn't been washed out yet."

"Nope, but if you dawdle too long it will be," Violet warned.

"Then we'd best be moving out." Don took her advice. That was one of the few pieces of information that he was certain he could use. He gathered up the other two and hustled them back through Lake Pot Hole next to the Suburban and across the street to the General Store.

"You're kidding, right?" Colby muttered.

"Following up on leads," was Don's reply. They wouldn't stay long, not with the rain still coming down, but without town support the out-of-town G-men wouldn't get very far; especially if the suspects turned out to be guilty. There were too many ways for people to disappear in these hills and not surface for years if not longer. No, better to take the longer but more certain path.

The store clerk was something out of a TV sitcom from the seventies: elderly, fringe of white hair ringing his ears, and a faded white apron hanging from around his scrawny neck. He looked up as they walked in. "What can I do for you folks? Better make it quick; I'm closin' up shop for the day. Don't expect many folks to be lookin' for supplies, not in this weather."

"Won't take long," Don assured him. "We're hoping to head on up to the old castle on the hill, hoping we can find a dry place to spend the night. Thought we might take up a little food. Don't suppose that there's much in an old place like that." _Don't mention the silver bullets, not yet. Ease into it._

"Don't have much left," the man frowned, nodding at the half-empty shelves around the store. Most of the remnants looked to be dried food in cardboard boxes, tasting approximately like the cardboard itself. Even the cans looked doubtful, and there was nothing fresh catching anyone's eye Fairly clean, but the rain outside had made a certain amount of mud inevitable. Don tried not to be judgmental. The storeclerk—Jeb Caldwell, if Don had heard Ms. Ferres correctly—wiped his hands on his dingy white apron. "Couple folks here before you, kind of cleaned me out. Got some of that frozen junk left."

"We'll take it," Don said promptly.

The old man smirked. Another sale, to the stupid city folk types. _Ka-ching!_ "You said you're heading up to old Isabel's place? Suppose you know that it's haunted."

"I heard something about that," Don said carefully. In the background he could feel both David and Colby letting him do all the talking. "You ever see anything funny up that way?"

"Maybe. Maybe," the old man mused. "Plenty of funny things up around here. Mostly we don't pay much mind to 'em. You sure you want to be hikin' up there? Not the friendliest place to be headin' for." He peered closely at Don, sparing a side glance for his fellow agents. "You been talking to Ms. Violet, over at the Town Hall?"

"Yeah," Don admitted. "She sent us to you for supplies."

The old man nodded. "Only place around here that has food. And other things," he added significantly.

Don sighed. It was going to cost him; him personally, if the boss turned down his request to be reimbursed for silver bullets. "Personally, I've never seen a were-wolf," he said with a sigh, "but I've been to too many places where I've seen too many things that don't seem to have sensible explanations. From what Mz. Violet was saying, there's a possibility that Mz. Isabel's mansion might be one of those places. And, being a sensible government agent type with a hankering to eventually collect a pension instead of a disability check for being crazy, I'm never going to admit that those unexplainable things exist, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to ignore what's going on around me. How much for a box?" _Please, Colby, don't whistle the theme from 'X-Files'!_

The old man cackled. It sounded strangely reminiscent of Ms. Violet's laughter. "You got yourself a brain, sonny." He pulled out a small and battered cardboard box, not bothering to open the thing and let Don look inside. Still, Don caught a glimpse of something shiny under the dark brown cover. "Lemme tell you, I've been up that way at night, and I wouldn't be heading back there any time soon. The things I've seen…" he trailed off.

"Like?" Don prompted.

"Like wolves," the old man said promptly. "Big ones. Eyes that glow in the dark. Scary eyes, not like regular wolf eyes. And the sounds!" The old man whistled the 'X-Files' phrase himself, saving Colby the trouble. "No sir-ee! I wouldn't be caught up there at night, not without a platoon of soldier boys both behind me and in front of me! I'd be headin' back down the hill, rain or no rain!"

This story was getting better and better. Don wouldn't have been surprised to see a travel agent somewhere in the background, feeding the details, trying to drum up business to turn Ferresville into a tourist trap: _come see the spooky monsters! Feed the real live were-wolves that we've tamed for your entertainment!_ The general store economy was likely to be a mite shy on cash, so development of a new line of merchandise was needed. What would be next? Plushy and cuddly foam-stuffed were-wolf dolls? A couple of Count Chocula's made out of recycled land fill plastic to go with the kid's cereal on the grocery shelves?

But there could always be a nugget of truth behind the tales, something that would lead Don et al to determine if Marybel Duckett was the cat burglar behind the theft of the Michelette painting. Don pursed the topic. "Were-wolves? Around here? How long have they been around?"

The store clerk leaned onto the countertop. "Long time," he replied promptly. "Ever since I was a boy. Weren't as many back then, only heard about 'em once in a while. My granddaddy, he saw one when he was a little tyke. That was back in 1874, so the story goes. But they've been growing more of 'em back in the hills. They're getting more numerous, enough so's a wise man takes his shotgun and a silver bullet or two with him if he goes hunting. Some of the hounds, they won't go into the brush at all."

Don egged him on. "They stay on one part of the mountain, or are they all over?"

"All over," the store clerk assured him. "All over. Mostly toward the mansion where old Isabel used to live, toward the Duckett place, but all over."

That perked up Don's ears. "The Duckett place? I thought that was on the other side of the mountain."

"Naw. Them maps, they got it all wrong. Sure, it's a little bit over, but the better road around these parts goes right past Duckett's before heading on up to Isabel's old place. It's a paved road, too, not with all the mudslides that the main road usually has. Had a rockslide there once, but that was just a fluke. Haven't had another one since fifty-four," the clerk added. "Due for another one. Might not be particularly safe, not with this weather."

"Sounds like the route that we want to take," Don said casually, keeping his excitement down. "Getting too late to try and get back down the mountain. You got a map I can buy?"

"Got one or two," the old man allowed. "Little dusty. Don't know how accurate they are; made by city folk. Not much call for 'em."

"Got a call now," Don assured the man. "Can you point out the road? By the Duckett place, you said," tracing his finger along the paper route. "We'll keep an eye out for them. You have any supplies that you need taken to them?"

"Nope. Miss Nicole was here earlier, took everything that they needed." The clerk peered out through the front store window. "You fellers better git a move on, if you don't want to get caught in another downpour. You sure you want to try it tonight, not just hole up somewhere till it dries out? Them clouds are lookin' a mite heavy, and here it is supper time."

"We'll do that, sir," Don told him. "Let's go, guys. We've got some shelter to find," he told the others, knowing that the clerk would be listening carefully to everything he said and on the phone to the neighbors the second the three FBI agents walked out the door. Don didn't mind; it was simply the way of things in places like these. Cheap entertainment.

* * *

"The odor is getting stronger now," Megan noted. "Amita was right. It's making me dizzy as well. We'd better get out of this bedroom."

Larry frowned. "It doesn't smell like natural gas, and that's what I would expect if we had a gas leak. But that too doesn't make sense; the gas was turned off years ago, when Cousin Isabel passed away and the house closed up. What can it be?"

"Less talk, more action," Charlie advised. "Amita?" He touched her face. "Amita, wake up. Can you hear me?"

"Mm." Opening her eyes was not high on the agenda.

This was getting alarming. Charlie's own head was swimming. "Amita, we have to get out of here. Wake up!"

"Mm. Final's tomorrow, Mom."

"Amita!"

"Pick her up," Megan advised. "Do it now! We have to get out of this room!"

The odor was getting heavier. Despite the broken window letting in rain and fresh air, the scent was over-powering, making them stagger. Charlie pulled Amita into a sitting position, Larry assisting to get her to her feet, and together the quartet wobbled to the door, bouncing off of the wall as they passed.

The hall was better, but not free of gas. Megan, the clearest-headed of them all, directed them down the stairs and back to the Great Room. They staggered into the main room, hoping that the larger area would dissipate the gas enough to think—and breathe.

And then the candles went out!

"Damn," Megan cursed. They could hear the concern in her voice. No one yet dared describe the sensation as fear; it was unbecoming to a Federal Agent.

But when an immense shaggy figure reared its head and growled at them, backlit from the dwindling coals in the fireplace, that was grounds for any and all noises coming from any of the four of them, up to and including screams of terror from more than one participant.

To her credit, Megan got off one shot before they dashed out of the Great Room.


	7. Stomy Night 7

Don hoped that he didn't look like something the cat dragged in, but in this weather he would be lucky to arrive at any place with clothes fit for cleaning rags instead of the trash heap. He really pitied David Sinclair at the moment: the man had long since given up any hope of salvaging the high end sweater that was soaked even beneath the heavy water-resistant jacket that he'd worn.

No matter. He was a Federal agent, and so were the other two, and they had a job to do, through rain/wind/sleet/hail, etc. The line had been developed for the U.S. mail, an equally fine organization, but at the moment it fit the FBI as well. Don plowed ahead, leading the other two to the door of a small but cozy cottage nestled in the rain-drenched back end of nowhere. He knocked on the door after pushing the doorbell twice and failing to hear an answering ring inside. Doorbell: broken. Little niggling doubts assailed him—how likely was it that a trio of cat burglars would have a place in need of this much repair? Don knocked again, loudly to be heard above the driving rain.

"Who is it?"

"FBI, ma'am. We're here to ask some questions. Is this the residence of Marybel Duckett?"

The door opened, and a young woman looked out at them, clean and dry compared to their bedraggled state. Her fluffy blonde curls bounced daintily as she looked past them to the driving rain outside. "In this downpour? It must be important. What do you want with Marybel?"

Don winced. "Frankly, ma'am, it was on our way to someplace where we could hole up for the night, and it was more important to simply get this done before the roads closed down for the night. May we come in?" _Looks like we're not going to need that warrant. This is one time that I'd have preferred there to be a bit of opposition. This is our last lead!_

"Certainly." She stepped back out of the way. "Would you mind taking your coats off right away? I just washed the floor in here. Mud gets tracked in all the time."

Groan; better and better all the time. Point in this suspect's favor: pleasant. Next good point: not shooting at him. Third point: no chemical smells, suggesting a meth lab in the basement. And lastly: clean. Don couldn't remember the last time he'd interviewed a suspect that actually cleaned their house on a regular basis. The low end types didn't care and the high end types hired low end types to do it for them and then complained when the blood stains didn't get cleaned properly. In fact, the only bad point that Don could hold against her was that her chances of being the criminal that had stolen the Michelette were hovering between slim and none. _How do you say, 'wild goose chase'?_

But, this was business. And sometimes his business sent him on wild goose chases. That didn't mean that it didn't get done. "Are you Marybel Duckett, ma'am?" Don asked politely.

"Me? No, I'm Nicole, her sister. Marybel!" she called to the back room. "You've got some gentlemen callers. From the FBI," she added mischievously. "Better hustle."

"Be right there. Give me a minute," floated back out.

It was longer than a minute; it was closer to five and Don intercepted the look that David and Colby exchanged, wondering if their suspect was flying the coop. Don himself was starting to doubt, when the answer became clear. Marybel appeared.

There was a reason that the doorways were so wide. Don had noted it, had dismissed it as unimportant at the moment. The light switches had been lowered, and the furniture carefully spread to the edges of the room. There was a reason for that, as well: it was to facilitate movement within the area. It was to accommodate a wheelchair.

Marybel Duckett wheeled herself out to the main room where her sister and the three FBI agents waited.

"Sorry to be so slow," she apologized. "I was on my bed, took a moment to get myself situated."

Marybel Duckett was a pretty girl, slender and dark-haired. Don couldn't determine her height, not sitting as she was in her wheelchair. Gentle muscles in her arms suggested that she had been athletic before the accident that had put her there, then Don remembered that many chair-bound people developed those muscles from constant use of wheeling themselves about. The legs, underneath a politely crocheted afghan, were undoubtedly withering away, the tips of fraying bedroom slippers peeking out from underneath with toes shoved into socks with multi-colored toes appearing through the opening in the slippers. Those toes didn't move. Not one inch; not one iota.

The major point of his observation, though, told him that no matter what information he got from this chick, she was not one of the cat burglars that stole the Michelette. Don was willing to accept that people could do amazing things without the use of their legs, but climbing down from a roof into a museum gallery and snatching a well-guarded painting wasn't one of them. Leaving size seven shoeprints on the top of the museum roof just wasn't in the realm of possibilities, not even with toes pushed into socks with a different color for each toe. No matter how much enjoyment he and the other two had gotten from their excursion into the California mountains, they were still back to square one: no leads on who had stolen the ugly roll of canvas.

Too bad. These girls had looked such promising candidates, once Colby had done a bit of computer research on them. There were three of them, the footprints could all have been women's, and one had ordered the Chromantic and the Wrachet 2000. But who had been the third person up on the roof of the museum? Was there another person involved? Don didn't want to give up on them, not yet. It didn't look good, but it was raining outside, and Don didn't want to go back out there, and he wanted a lead—any lead—to pan out.

"Special Agent Don Eppes," he introduced himself with a brief flash of his badge. "Agents Sinclair and Granger. Did you purchase a Chromantic and a Wrachet 2000 online just a few weeks ago?"

Marybel frowned. "Yes, but it was more like a few months ago. They were horribly slow in filling the order. I almost cancelled it, then they emailed to say that it had been shipped. Why? Is one them defective? They seem to be working okay. What's the FBI's interest?"

"You're using it?" It slipped out of David.

Marybel gave him an odd look. "Well, yes, that was the general idea behind ordering it. I typically try not to purchase things that I have no use for. _You_ may have a lot of extra money lying around for things like that, but _I_ don't." She indicated the chair, trying not to sound bitter. "Trust me on this; all my extra cash goes into those little medical expenses that insurance doesn't cover."

"What do you use them for? The Wrachet, I mean, and the Chromantic?" Don asked.

"Web site design," she replied promptly. "Great business for stay at home people. Saves on the commuting costs," Marybel added with a wry smile, "especially when the roads are a little washed out."

"Uh, yeah." Don was feeling more and more foolish. "Listen, just to cover all the bases, would you mind if we took a look at where you have them? Just to put in the report, you understand."

"Feel free, but it's going to take a least a couple of hours," Marybel told him. "It gets installed _way_ in the back of my box, and it'll be very hard to spot. And right now, the box is behind like fourteen cartons of files. Joanie is cleaning and filing. _Again_," she said with a weary sigh. "Better her than me."

"All three of you are involved in this web design business?"

"Sure. What did you think? That just because we live in Ferresville, we don't have to work like everyone else? That we live on government hand-outs?" Marybel snorted. "You've been listening to the people in town too much, Special Agent Eppes." She cocked her head. "What is it that you're really after? What crime or crimes plural have I committed? Felony hit and run with a wheelchair? Knocked over a bank with a speedy getaway? I can't even get Disability to spring for a motorized wheelchair, let alone one with a turbo-charged engine."

"No, ma'am." The uncomfortable feeling was growing. "We're investigating a case of art theft."

"Not that Los Angeles cat burglar case I read about in the papers, I hope? Where the alleged perpetrators climbed in through the fourth story window from the roof?" Yes, there was definitely a laugh in Nicole's voice, and Don couldn't blame her. This whole excursion was appearing pretty lame at the moment.

"Yes, ma'am, it is."

"Wow." Marybel laughed, and held out her wrists. "Cuff me, Special Agent Eppes. I confess: I'm guilty. In my deep dark computer lab in the non-existent basement of this house, I invented an anti-gravity machine to fly me through the air to steal a painting. Who was the artist again? I want to make sure that I get the details right for my confession." Then she got serious. "Do you really want to look at the Chromantic and the Wrachet? It'll take a while, but we can do it. Here, I'll even give you permission to look through the house for that painting, whatever it is." She waved at the decidedly plebeian surroundings. "I think the most expensive piece we have here is a thirty dollar wood carving that we fell in love with at the county fair. You're welcome to investigate that purchase too, if you like, although I think we threw away the sales slip. We can't prove that we own it."

Don now felt about on par with swamp scum. And the girls were being so nice about it. He mustered his courage. "Ma'am, if you'll give us permission"—never mind the warrant. It clearly hadn't been needed—"we'll take a quick look around, just so our report can say that we didn't find any evidence, and we'll on our way." Because right about now, getting thoroughly drenched and cold and possibly getting pneumonia from the weather outside was preferable to suspecting this girl in a wheelchair of lifting an ugly expensive oil painting.

"Go ahead." This was amusing to both Marybel and Nicole. Marybel lifted her voice to call to the back. "Joanie, you can stop dusting now. They're coming through, and they're going to see what a lousy house-keeper you are."

"Can't you give me five minutes to straighten up the place?"

"Nope. You've already had ten. Time's up." Marybel turned back to the agents. "Go ahead, guys. Have a field day. Oh, and you'll need the key to get into the root cellar out back. You could break down the door, but it would take a lot longer, and then you'd be out in the rain a lot more."

From their expressions, Don realized that his team felt as foolish as he did.

* * *

Charlie slammed the door to the kitchen shut behind them, irrational fear tearing at them all, shutting the Great Room behind. The door was meager protection, but they all wanted whatever protection they could get. "Did you hit it?"

"I don't think so." Megan looked as wild as they'd ever seen her. "I don't see how I could have missed, but I don't think so. It was still standing."

"I too fail to see how you could have missed." Larry paced back and forth nervously. "Is it still out there?"

"I don't hear anything," Charlie replied, putting his ear to the heavy oak door, all that separated them from the monster in the Great Hall. "Hush. Let me listen."

"It's gone?"

"I'm still not hearing anything."

"It would have growled or shrieked or something if I'd hit it," Megan said. "At least, I think it would have." Her gun was still in her hand. So was the tremor.

"Let's get out of here," Amita suggested, holding her head with her hands as if afraid that it would fall off. " Let's take the back door. Whatever it was, this isn't worth it."

"We can't," Charlie reminded her. "The roads are out. The SUV is stuck in the mud outside. We can't leave until it dries out."

"And there's no way that we'd be able to outrun it, not in this weather," Megan said.

"I'd almost be willing to chance a mad dash through the rain," Larry said darkly. "What was that thing? And where is it?" He looked back at them. "Believe me when I say this: there was _nothing_ like this whenever I visited Cousin Isabel as a child."

"This place may not be haunted, but there's definitely something going on, something that I can't explain." Megan was trying to keep her balance between rational FBI agent and pure fear.

"Or it may be haunted," Amita said. "Listen, if there's one thing I've learned in all the years that I've been studying, it's that we don't have all the answers."

"And this is the question?" Larry tried to take it in stride. "If it is, I propose we conduct our study during daytime hours; preferably with a great deal more resources at our beck and call. A platoon of soldiers, for example, in those daylight hours."

"Which isn't for another twelve hours," Charlie pointed out. "What are we going to do until then?" He listened again. "I still don't hear anything in there. No growling, no moving around. Whatever it was, I think it's gone. It left the same way it got in. I'm going to take a look."

"Don't open that door!" Amita started to shriek.

Too late. Charlie cracked it open.

Nothing happened. He listened a moment longer, peeking out through the slender crack, then pulled it further open.

"It's gone," he reported, surveying the Great Room. "There's nothing there."

"Let me." Megan pushed past him, gun still in her hand. "Charlie's right," she said after a long moment of looking around the room. She advanced. "Here's where it was," she said. She aimed her flashlight at the spot where they'd seen the beast. "I can still see the outline of its footprint." She looked up. "But how did it get in and out? This room is closed. Any animal from the outside would have to crawl through an opening, and there aren't any here. Everything is closed. That thing was _big_." Megan started to explore with her flashlight, not trusting the candles that Charlie had already begun to rekindle. "And, like you said, Charlie, it's not here."

"There has to be an explanation," Charlie insisted. He picked up one fat white candle, handing it off to Amita and lighting another. "We just have to find out what it is." He looked closely at the footprint that the creature had left behind. "Here's this print, and here's another where it walked away. Larry, it's not heading toward the door. It headed for the fireplace. Why?"

"Charles, you're asking me to speculate on the motives of a creature that may be unknown to modern science. One: such a creature may not exist. Two: it may not think in terms that we consider rational. Three: it may have a purpose that—"

"All right, all right, I get the point; although I think the point about it not existing is demonstrably a little far-fetched considering that we all saw it. Still, why did it walk toward the fire?" Charlie swung the candle around to look at the fireplace. Embers continued to smolder, emitting insufficient heat for comfort or light. Charlie handed his candle to Larry so that he could push another log onto the fire. He stoked it, sending up sparks, encouraging the flame to grow. "Walking toward the fire in the fireplace suggests that it isn't wild. Wild animals are afraid of fire."

"Not all wild animals," Larry pointed out. "As an example, I give you the African rhinoceros. It will actively seek out and stomp on fire to extinguish it. This behavior has been characterized as—"

"All right, all right. _Most_ animals are afraid of fire," Charlie amended. "Which means that either this one wasn't afraid, or that it wasn't an animal. I think we can rule out it's being a rhino," he added swiftly to forestall another Fleinhardt-ism. "The footprint is too skinny."

"Yes, but, Charlie, the question is: what was it?" Amita asked.

"And why did my bullet pass through it without anything happening?" Megan put in. "That's what I'd like to know. I'll admit, I was upset and that could have thrown off my aim, but I wasn't that far away. I was aiming for that thing's eye. I should have nailed it; it should be lying on the carpet, staining Larry's new old Oriental rug with its blood."

Larry winced.

"There has to be a logical explanation," Charlie said. "We have all these unanswered questions, things that don't seem to make sense in light of what we know to be true."

"There _is_ no light. It's dark outside and in."

"It's a figure of speech, Larry."

"I know that, Charles. I simply don't feel like putting up with it. Nor do I wish to put up with whatever is going on here!" he shouted to the room at large. "Do you hear me? This is _my_ house now, and I wish to enjoy it in peace!"

"Larry, you want to sell it."

"But first, I wish to remember my old Cousin Isabel, in all her matronly and aberrant glory," Larry said stubbornly. "This creature is interfering with that. Is an evening's reflection too much to ask from the fates? Does Cousin Isabel, for her faults, not deserve some few moments of thought on the accomplishments of a lifetime?" He gestured at the three paintings on the wall, all in the Impressionist style. "Those paintings, for example: they of course are copies, but they indicate that my second cousin thrice removed had a modicum of taste, and chose to exercise it. The statuary is another example of her unerring eye for quality, though I would not have guessed it from my memories of her behavior in later years. Cousin Isabel was quite eccentric."

"Completely unlike a certain physicist we know and love," murmured a feminine voice.

Larry ignored her. "So the decision before us is whether or not to brave the supernatural elements for which we have no explanation and no reasonable way to predict their course of action, or to sally forth into the more mundane yet clearly unpleasant elements of weather over which we have no control yet more knowledge of the likely outcome in regards to our continued long term existence."

"By 'likely outcome' do you mean pneumonia?" Amita asked with a healthy dollop of sarcasm.

"If you're putting it up for a vote, I say we stay inside where it's dry," Charlie told him. "Sure, the stuff that's going on here is spooky, but it _has_ to have an explanation. We just haven't found out what it is yet."

"Oh, ye of little faith," Larry said darkly. "Charles, has it occurred to you that there are some things in this cosmos that man was not meant to know? That perhaps this is one of them?"

"Larry, you were just shouting about wanting to be left in peace here to think of your aunt."

"Cousin. And I am reconsidering my options."

"Well, I'm not," Charlie told him cheerfully. "It's cold and wet outside." He bent down. "Besides, how many ghosts do you know that leave footprints on the carpet?"

"I was considering the reports on were-wolves that I've seen."

"In scientific journals—?"

"Don't be ridiculous, Charles. No peer-reviewed compilation of scholarly information would stoop to such depths except to deride those efforts to prove the existence of same. That, however, does not preclude the possibility of the actual existence of such creatures."

"No, just throws an awful lot of doubt on it," Charlie muttered. Something caught his attention; he squatted down to inspect the footprint. "That's odd."

"What?" Megan bent down to see what he was looking at. "It's a footprint. A little small, but a print."

"It looks like a man's print. Here, this looks like an outline, maybe of a shoe." Charlie put his own foot next to it. "See? A large oval here, a little narrower at the heel end."

Megan peered more closely. "Maybe it does look like a footprint, but not very much. It's not distinct enough to belong to an actual shoe; a carpet tends to muffle the outlines and this print that we're looking at could belong to anything. And even if it was a shoe, it wouldn't be a man's, Charlie. See? It isn't big enough to be a man's. Well, maybe a small man, but more likely a woman's." She straightened up. "But that was no woman we saw. It was well over six feet tall. _That _I'll guarantee. I may not have hit it, but I'm a good judge of height. It was over six feet tall," she repeated. "That print belongs to an animal of some sort, the one that we all saw."

"I concur," Larry agreed. "The identity of the creature eludes me, but it was clearly in the neighborhood of two meters in height." His eyes narrowed. "My knowledge of folklore is mediocre at best, but I seem to recall that both werewolves and the Sasquatch are noted to be taller than the average man."

"Larry, there's no such thing—"

"It will do as a working supposition," Amita put in hastily, as a compromise. "Let's look at the facts; over six feet tall, hairy, and able to disappear as though into thin air."

"Nothing _actually_ disappears into thin—"

"I said, 'as though', Charlie."

"And impervious to bullets," Megan put in. "Let's not forget that part. That makes it a little more dangerous, don't you think?"

"You're assuming that you hit it—" Charlie started.

Megan fixed him with an eyebrow set on stun.

Charlie subsided. "It's impervious to bullets. Unless there's a better explanation," he added hopefully. "Let's investigate. What lines of approach should we use?"

Three sets of eyes looked at him in horror.

"I was thinking more along the lines of 'how do we defend ourselves?', Charles," Larry told him. "If this creature is not susceptible to airborne lead projectiles propelled explosively at high velocity, then I wonder what would stop it. Some sort of barrier, perhaps?"

"What does it want?" Charlie put in. "I mean, it must have a reason for being here, in this place. What does it want? Food? Shelter? It's not just humans that need those things. Animals need food and shelter, as well."

Amita nodded, thinking. "Charlie's right. Maybe that thing moved in after seeing this place abandoned. Maybe it thinks that we've invaded its home."

"_My_ home," Larry put in darkly. "This is _my_ house now."

"But the creature doesn't know that," Megan pointed out. "Maybe we can scare it away, make it look for some place easier to live. I mean, it's a wild animal, isn't it?" She looked around, scanning the faces of her friends. "Isn't it?"


	8. Stormy Night 8

David Sinclair was thoroughly miserable. "This is it, Don. I hereby tender my resignation. Life doesn't get any worse than this."

Don didn't blame the agent. All three of them were currently trudging their way through ankle deep mud, having left the Suburban mired to the hubcaps in that same mud, unable to push it free. Rain was pelting them from above, bringing back memories of Larry discussing the concept of 'supersaturation'. _Fits, guy_, Don thought. _I'm now entitled to the money-back guarantee on this coat that they swore was water-proof._

Cold. Wet. Hungry. Cold. Really wet.

And humiliated. Don really _really_ wished that he'd known that Marybel Duckett was stuck in a wheelchair before they'd made this trek. It would have saved them a lot of time and effort and humiliation. The woman had been nice about it, though. She could have showered them with a lot of ranting and raving and made the FBI agents feel even worse than they already did.

Well, maybe not. If she'd been nasty about it, Don could have gotten nasty right back and decided that it served her right for being unpleasant. But this Marybel chick was one of those really good people who took bad things in stride and made the best of it, and that made Don and David and Colby feel even worse for hassling the trio of sisters. Bottom line, he didn't blame David one bit for the resignation crack.

"No good," he told the man. "FBI requires two weeks notice. You're stuck here just like the rest of us. Where's that damn house of Larry's? I thought it was only a mile up the road. I don't see any lights."

"You probably won't," Colby offered cheerfully. Of the three of them, he was taking it the best. He shook the excess water from his collar. "Megan said something about it being abandoned for the last couple of years. My guess is that they don't have any power." He grinned, the expression lost in the gloom. "I'm really hoping that they got the fireplace cleared out. I could use some heat right about now."

"That's assuming we make it that far," David grumbled. "I'm a city boy, Don, remember? Trekking through the trees in the dead of winter is not my idea of a good time."

"It's only fall."

"Close enough for government work, and this _is_ government work, remember?" David fixed Don with a baleful glare. "Next time you want to go admire the leaves turning, leave me out."

"Pun intended?"

"If I weren't so wet and cold, I'd throw something at you."

"At least we're not in the middle of a fire fight," Don pointed out.

"But then I'd be warm."

"Hey, is that it up ahead?" Colby interrupted the not-so-good-natured grumbling. "I see something big and dark."

"Any lights?"

"No, but like I said, I don't expect any."

"If it's Larry's house, it's dry." David brightened. "At least, drier than out here in the muck and rain. I think we're almost there." He picked up his pace.

* * *

"First things first," Megan said. "We all stick together at all times. No matter what, that thing won't want to approach a group of us, so we are never any of us alone. Nothing less than a group of two. Got it?"

"Okay with that here," Amita said, grabbing onto Charlie's arm.

But Charlie wasn't done inspecting the footprint that they'd found in the Great Room. "There's something wrong with this print."

"Quite correct. The fact that it is located in _my_ house being the first and foremost."

"No, I mean, besides that." Charlie got done on his hands and knees to peer at the offending mark. "I don't think this was made by an animal."

"It's a carpet, Charles. Of course the carpet was not made by an animal. There are only a few members of the animal kingdom that are noted for extensive furbishing of their homes; the bower bird, for example, is noted to actually 'paint' the walls of its nest with berry juices in order to attract an acceptable mate. None, however, that I am aware of have demonstrated the ability to _create_ carpeting for the flooring of their domicile. The thread count of that particular Oriental cannot possibly help us in our current dilemma."

"I'm not talking about making the carpet, Larry. I'm talking about making this footprint."

"Then you should be more precise in your remarks, Charles."

Amita wasn't amused by Larry's attempt to ignore the obvious. And Charlie was onto something. She interrupted their squabbling. "Okay, I'll bite. Why don't you think that footprint, or paw print, or whatever, wasn't made by an animal? Which, by logical deduction, suggests that it was made by either a man, or something supernatural."

Charlie sat up and ignored the supernatural crack. "Why isn't it wet?"

Megan's eyes narrowed. "What do you mean?"

"The footprint." Charlie felt it again with his hand. "The footprint isn't wet. The mud is dry. It's more dirt than mud. The whole thing was created through pressure, through the weight of the body on top of this carpet."

"All right, I'll bite. The footprint isn't wet. Why is that significant?" Amita asked.

"Because it's raining outside." Before any of them could prod him further with exasperation, Charlie plunged ahead. "If it's raining _outside_, anything that came _inside_ would track rain and mud along with them. Therefore, whatever made this print was not outside. At least, not for a while. It's been inside long enough to dry off."

Megan cocked her head. "You may be right, Charlie."

"I really hope that you're not," was Amita's alarmed contribution, "because that means that that thing is still inside here with us! Maybe it's got a nest in here somewhere!"

"Interesting, but doesn't change what we need to do." Megan cut to the chase, extended a hand to pull Charlie up to his feet. "We need to focus, people. Inside or out, that thing is real, whatever it is, and a danger to us. We're sticking together, here in this Great Room. Let's pull the furniture around us as a barricade. The thing will have to jump over it to get to us, and by then maybe I can do a better job of shooting it."

"I feel like I've wandered onto the set of a 'B' Western," Charlie complained, but he lent his strength to shoving the love seat into position. "Only instead of Indians riding around, we've got this big hairy creature."

Megan ignored him. "And we need more light. How many candles are there? We need to keep some burning at all times, set up a watch so that some of us can get some sleep."

"There are more candles upstairs. I'll go get them," Charlie volunteered.

"Don't go!" Anita said, alarmed. "Charlie, that thing might be up there! We need to stay together."

Charlie shook his head. "Amita, the footprints ended up at the fireplace. That thing wasn't headed for the stairs. I'll be back in a moment. Wait here." He grabbed a flashlight and headed up the grand staircase, treads creaking in protest beneath his weight.

"Charlie—"

Even Megan looked uncomfortable—and annoyed with the mathematician's behavior. "We should stay together," she murmured, brushing her hand against the handgun tucked into her waistband. But, grimly, she looked around. "C'mon, Larry; give me a hand with these tables. We'll use them as an additional barricade."

"That table looks expensive," Larry complained, moving to join her.

"No, it doesn't. It looks heavy."

"Like I said: expensive." Bitterly.

* * *

Whatever gas it was, the odor had substantially dissipated when Charlie arrived back at the bedrooms upstairs. It only took a moment to locate the fat candle that had rolled onto the carpet where Amita had dropped it. He looked around; there had been other candles, and they would need all of them. A single candle, as welcome as it could be, could only produce so much light. Plus, who knew how long it would last? Charlie glanced at his watch: not yet nine o'clock. There was plenty of the night to be gotten through, no matter what the cause of the terror in Larry's home. Charlie lit the candle, using the light to locate other candles in the dark. Shadows sprang up, dark and forbidding in the flickering light of the small flame.

He looked around. There was another one, sitting on the edge of the night stand next to the bed. Charlie frowned; there was something wrong. Something was out of place, something that he'd noticed before. Something was missing. Hadn't there been a small figurine on that stand? He walked over to the piece of furniture.

Small and squat. Dark wood, mahogany perhaps, or walnut. There was a single drawer in the square wooden night stand with a golden tinted knob, and the candle was positioned toward the edge of the surface, toward the corner.

And—aha! Dust. Or, rather, the placement of the dust. It was all over the top of the nightstand, with a distinctive and suspicious oval missing from the center of the surface. Charlie grimaced; he'd seen many odd things since his brother Don had brought him in to work on FBI cases but he had yet to see an animal, large or small, that thought that removing a figurine from a nightstand to be important. Charlie had been right; there had been a figurine on the nightstand and it was now missing. And it wasn't lying broken on the floor below, and it hadn't rolled underneath the bed. It had vanished entirely. Which meant that someone—or some_thing_, to be fair—had taken it.

Furthermore, the dust was still untouched. Whoever had taken the figurine had carefully lifted the object straight up into the air before disposing of it. There were no claw marks or swirls in the dust suggesting that something small had crept up onto the nightstand to do the dastardly deed.

Therefore, it wasn't an animal. Animals considered figurines nothing more than oddly shaped rocks. A magpie might have grabbed a piece with shiny metal on it, but Charlie recalled that this particular piece was of dirty white alabaster with no particular shine at all. And if it wasn't an animal doing the thievery, then it was something else. It could be a supernatural something or other—and the fact that Megan's bullet had apparently passed straight through it tended to bolster _that_ hypothesis—but Charlie wasn't yet willing to seriously entertain that notion. As Amita had said, there were plenty of things that they didn't understand yet, but jumping to the conclusion that Bigfoot or a ghost was inhabiting this house was not what he was willing to admit to yet. _Yet._ There were still lots of possible explanations, and Charlie hadn't even begun to explore them. There were people out there—his brother among them—that tended to consider Charlie's own skills at math to be something akin to wizardry, but it was just simple logic. Anyone could do what Charlie could do, given enough education and enough desire and dedication to learn to add numbers in all their various forms of glory. At least, that was the way Charlie looked at it. _He_ never considered himself to be especially gifted, just fascinated by numbers. That was all.

Back to the topic at hand: this was important. The fact that this figurine was missing, apparently by human hands, meant that there was someone human inside this abandoned mansion of Larry's, someone human besides the four of them. It meant that someone was trying to frighten them away, frighten them into leaving. Who? And, more importantly, why? What was here in this house that someone needed to protect?

Hm. Why was the figurine missing? Was it important? Obviously so, otherwise someone wouldn't have taken it. Was it just the figurine, or was there something else that had been taken? Charlie looked around, trying to remember what else had been in this bedroom. Or, how about in the hall outside the bedroom? Charlie snatched up three more candles, stuffing them awkwardly into his pockets for later use, and turned to head into the hall to investigate.

The floor plank creaked underneath him. Charlie ignored it; these old houses had plenty of creaks to them. One more wouldn't make a difference.

Something flew out at him, something white and filmy and screeching. Charlie instinctively threw up his hands to ward off whatever it was. It streaked across the room toward the window. Charlie stepped back, trying to avoid being hit.

Which was when the creaking floorboard in the bedroom decided that enough was enough. That it had had it. That it had put up with the excessive weight of Dr. Fleinhardt's second cousin thrice removed for far too long before her bulk had condescended to take itself to a higher plane of existence. That the years of neglect of this once stately mansion would no longer be tolerated without some form of payback.

It cracked.

It splintered.

It broke.

* * *

"What was that?" The handgun was in Megan's hand in an instant. Afterward, she would never be able to remember pulling it out of her belt.

"Charlie!" Amita identified the yell, not that it was difficult. With only one member missing from their party, it was a simple deduction.

"Hurry." Larry led them out of their improvised fortress of furniture, none of them hesitating.

"I should never have let him go by himself," Megan muttered. "I should have known better." She held the others back, insisting on taking the lead. "Watch the stairs. Don't fall."

It was as if the staircase heard her. The tread underneath Dr. Fleinhardt, perhaps in retribution for all the unpleasant thoughts that he'd harbored for his thrice-removed second cousin Isabel as a child, cracked. His foot crashed through the step of the stairs, then three of the surrounding treads also splintered, and the man fell into the story below, his own startled yell of dismay following him until it was abruptly cut off.

The basement. With a variety of small wildlife such as bugs, mice, snakes, and the occasional plague of cockroaches.

Even the gun wouldn't help here.

"Larry!" The thought of entering that hell hole of a basement was enough to make anyone quail in their boots, but Megan was made of sterner stuff. She was a Federal agent, and she had a reputation to live up to, no matter what her personal feelings. "Larry! Can you hear me?"

"He must be hurt," Amita worried, when no answer emerged immediately from the depths. A slender puff of dust wafted up to drift in the meager illumination of the flashlight. "We have to go get him." Math professors could likewise demonstrate bravery under fire. "But what about Charlie?"

"I don't like this," Megan said grimly. The pistol in her hand was feeling less and less reassuring. "This can't be a coincidence, losing both of them at once." She glanced over at Amita. "No matter what, you and I stick together. Clear?"

"More than clear," Amita announced, wide-eyed. "I am now your Siamese twin." She picked up a figurine made of heavy marble. The artist had intended that it be for decorative purposes but the weight of the object made it more than acceptable for use as a club. "Which one first?"

Megan made the decision. "Larry. We know where he is, and how to get to him. We go through the kitchen to the entrance to the basement. We're not certain where Charlie is," she said grimly. "We'll get him next. Got it?"

"Okay." Amita wasn't happy, but both choices made one of their party second on the list of people to be found. Megan's decision was rational, and it was more important to get moving. "Let's go. The door to the basement is over this way."

"Wait a moment. What was that noise?" Megan heard something. "Over there."

"It can't be Larry, or Charlie. It's coming from the front of the house, toward the Great Room." Amita's eyes widened. "Where that animal was."

Megan took a firmer grip on her handgun. "Who's out there?" she yelled. "I've got a gun!"


	9. Stormy Night 9

Dr. Fleinhardt had never been overly pleased at inheriting his second cousin Isabel's mansion, and the events of the past few hours had done nothing to alter that opinion. The next few minutes also did nothing to sway him.

He decided to classify the happening as 'having the wind knocked out of him.' That would successfully account for his lack of response to the shouts that Megan and Amita had undoubtedly sent after his falling through the rotted stair treads.

All right, that dealt with the small issue of his own behavior. Now, on to more important things: why weren't Megan and Amita continuing to shout? Dr. Fleinhardt felt a flicker of annoyance. Had he not just fallen under less than ideal circumstances? Was he not—_ugh!_—surrounded by various specimens collectively known as vermin? And that was prior to considering the effect of the incessant dust that Cousin Isabel in her dotage had failed to deal with. Clearly the woman had simply abandoned this section of the manse to those best equipped to take advantage of her laxity. Large burlap-covered bundles dotted the edges of the cavernous area, mice and even rats utilizing the burlap for nesting materials. Thank goodness that no food had been stored in this place—the entire mansion would have been infested beyond redemption had his cousin done so.

_Achoo!_

Larry observed his handkerchief mournfully. The thing would be dripping wet within minutes if he was not rescued forthwith. Speaking of which, where were they? "Megan!" he shouted out, aiming for the hole through which he'd fallen. "Amita! Anyone out there?"

It wasn't silence that greeted him. The lack of sound was swiftly overtaken by the rustling of field mice now morphed into fat vagrants. The pattering of tiny feet here and there overlapped with a sensation of small bodies hurtling through space at a speed approaching that of light, so fast that his eyes couldn't identify their identity or species even had he been capable of seeing in the dark. That was a blessing. Larry didn't really want to be capable of identifying either identity or species or even phylum. "Megan! Amita!" His own voice carried more than a modicum of terror. "Megan! Amita!"

Still no answer, and the response by the rodentia didn't qualify as a rescue party. Larry shuddered. He could already imagine the rats trying to decide whether they would serve Fleinhardt Flambe or if they would simply dish him up out of a slow cooker.

This would never do. Dr. Fleinhardt had things to accomplish, people to see, galaxies to discover, and an overly filthy trodden-down ramshackle mansion to sell before his demise. If the remainder of his party were so derelict that they couldn't be bothered to lend him a hand, then Dr. Fleinhardt would simply have to tackle the task himself. He hoisted himself to his feet at great risk to the deep coating of grime located on the arm of the chair that had been tossed into the basement to keep it out of the way.

The chair, as decrepit as it appeared, did not collapse under the strain. Dr. Fleinhardt's ankle, however, did.

In the dark it was impossible to accurately determine the level of damage sustained in the earlier fall. Broken? Quite likely. Sprained? Also a possibility, albeit less likely given the intense sensation it was emitting forth via the peripheral nervous system that linked directly to the pain centers in his brain.

"Megan! Amita!"

Still no response, although by this time Dr. Fleinhardt didn't expect one. His call was merely an auditory expression of his disgust with the entire affair, enough so that he was willing to consider selling the place at a fraction of its worth merely to be done with the matter and never have to consider it ever again.

_What to do, what to do?_ He could barely see the staircase leading to the main floor of the house. And it was located across a broad expanse of filth and vermin, with the treads, what he could see of them in the gloom, appearing as trustworthy as the main staircase that had put him here.

_Selling this monstrosity of a domicile is too good for it_, Dr. Fleinhardt thought darkly.

* * *

The welcoming overhang to the front door was just large enough to accommodate the three FBI agents, but wind still drove the cold rain at them. At this point, Don reflected, it truly didn't matter. Each one of them was soaked to the skin and shivering. Even Colby's irrepressible spirits had been dampened, pun intended.

Maybe not so welcoming. There was nothing particularly inviting about the beam that was hanging by a single nail, swinging in the gale force winds and threatening to knock one or more of the agents to the sodden ground. One gutter that bore a startling resemblance to swiss cheese offered a steady drip down one side of the overhang that, with the wind's assistance, turned small raindrops into an ice cold shower capable of dousing the most ardent of suitors. And the nearly threadbare rhododendron to the other side would have boasted icicles on its bare branches had it been clever enough to realize that the downpour was freezing rain.

_Someone had better answer this door_, Don grumped to himself, knocking loudly on the door. The echoes of his fist rumbled away into a cavernous distance inside, suggesting a great deal of hollowness beyond. All right, so it even _sounded_ like the damn haunted house that the store clerk had tried to spin the story about. Right now Don didn't care if the mansion was home to Frankenstein's monster and a flock of vampire bats. He wanted _in_ out of the rain, and he wanted it _now_. He knocked again, harder, listening for any sounds of habitation, anything that would indicate that they'd arrived at Larry's inheritance and didn't need to sally forth back into the pseudo-hurricane.

There was still no human response. The moaning of the wind through the trees most definitely didn't count.

"Try again," Colby suggested, stomping his feet, trying to persuade himself that they weren't courting frostbite. His hands were tucked under his armpits, seeking their own meager shelter since Colby hadn't yet been able to provide it for the rest of his carcass. "I could have sworn that I heard something before."

"Well, we're not hearing it now, and there's nobody coming to the door," David grouched.

Don banged as hard as he could on the heavy oaken door. "Charlie! Larry!" he yelled. "Anybody home?"

"This is ridiculous," was David's opinion. "Don, it's cold and wet out here! Try the door."

Which, to their surprise, wasn't locked. The knob twisted easily in Don's hand and the door swung open without creaking. That in itself struck them as odd. A place this old and this decrepit ought to have a creak or two in the door.

No matter. Inside it was dry, and out of the wind, and it was where Don and David and Colby were going to hole up for the night unless someone came up with a damn good reason why not. At this point it didn't matter if it was Larry's new acquisition or some other looney toon castle on the mountain. The three FBI agents weren't going anywhere.

There was a foyer, and a Great Room beyond. The Great Room had deserved those capital letters in the not too distant past but now it was a mere shrouded shadow of itself. The sofas had been covered to keep the thick layer of dust from settling deep into the springs, and a large used-to-be-gilt harp sat beside a lonely and undoubtedly out of tune grand piano. The gilt flickered in beam from David's flashlight.

"Larry? Charlie? Megan? Anybody here? Amita?"

No answer. There was something wrong. All three of them noticed it at once, and three handguns slipped out of their holsters into their owners' hands. Each FBI agent felt marginally more comfortable with the firepower where they could use it at a moment's notice. The three carefully eased themselves into a group, protecting each other's backs, automatically scanning the surroundings. It wasn't easy; there was little light, just what was seeping in through the blinds and a few dying embers in the fireplace. With the storm and the night, it was almost pitch black. Only David's flash pierced the dismal gloom.

"Don," David asked ultra calmly, "why is the furniture arranged like someone was waiting for the Indians to attack the wagon train?"

Colby grabbed the poker, and jabbed at the wood in the fireplace to stir up heat and light and clues. "This is still hot. There was a fire here recently; hasn't quite died down. What happened? Where's Megan and the others, assuming that this really is Larry's castle and that we didn't miss it in the storm."

"I'm not liking this." Don scanned the surroundings. Nothing was moving, with the bare exception of a tree branch outside scraping against the window, waving in the storm's wind. "Something happened here. Something bad happened here."

The photons raced past a fat candle perched on an end table that hadn't been dragged into the protective circle. Without comment, Colby spotted and nabbed a twig from the kindling nearby and used it to light the candle, and then the next two other candles that were upright on other tables. It didn't help much, but any port in the proverbial storm…

"Stick close." This was no longer fun. This was not three FBI agents, caught out in the weather, forced to take cover at an acquaintance's home. This was serious. All of their instincts were screaming _wrong wrong wrong!_ "What do you see? Talk to me, people."

"Heavy furniture," David noted. "Dust scraped off recently, when it was dragged into a circle. This suggests that whoever was here was afraid, and needed shelter from something here inside the house."

"Definitely Megan and the others." Colby picked up a water-soaked brown leather jacket from where it had been hung to dry out. "This is hers. This has got to be Larry's house."

"And they were here for a while before anything happened," Don realized. "They had time to build a fire in the fireplace, and time to start cleaning." He waved at the table which had been cleared of dust and debris. "They were here for a couple of hours, at least, before whatever it was attacked. Hey," he said, surprised, and bent down.

"Don?"

"Bullet casings," he said grimly, picking up the empty shells in his hand. "Cold. What do you want to bet that these belong to Megan?" He looked around, trying to see other clues that would lead him to the four missing people. "Wait a sec; what's that?"

"Where?"

"Staircase." Don headed in that direction, pulling the other two with him.

One tread had been cracked in two, shattering into splinters and dust with a hole in it large enough for a man to fall through. The treads above and below had also been dragged apart, widening the opening.

"Bring your flash here, David. You see anything down there?"

"It's a black hole, in the Fleinhardt sense, Don. It's swallowing up all of the light—"

"No, wait," Don interrupted him. "I saw something twitch. In the dark."

"A rat?" Colby guessed.

But a querulous voice floated up from the Stygian depths. "I am most certainly not a member of the Rattus genus, and I will thank you to remember that in the future."

"Larry?" Don immediately recognized the voice. "Is that you?"

"And who else would have the misfortune to be stuck in the filthy and verminous basement of this monstrosity? Where are the others? How did you get here? What are you doing here?" And, most importantly: "_Get me out of here!_"

"It's him," Colby said unnecessarily to the others. "Uh, Dr. Fleinhardt, don't get me wrong on this, got a great house here, but what are you doing down there?"

"This is not 'a great house', as you so quaintly put it, Agent Granger," Larry all but snarled in return. "This domicile is as determined as its previous owner to cause me as much distress as possible and at this point I am equally eager to return the favor. If you would be so kind as to lower a rope of some type so that I might remove myself from these surroundings? The sooner, the better, I might add."

David looked at Don and Colby with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. "I think we left some rope in the Suburban." _And it's still raining out, buckets of it_, was the unspoken second half of the statement.

But his boss was a good and caring team leader, even if he didn't care about Sinclair's current lack of sartorial flair. "It would take too long to trek back out there. Larry, was there any rope that you saw around, maybe in the kitchen?"

"Yank down the curtains," was Larry's heartfelt rejoinder. "Just get me out of here!"

Don rocked back on his heels. "You heard the man. Yank down a curtain."

Moments later a very dirty physicist grabbed onto hands to help pull himself up through the broken stair treads, sneezing and holding on to the others to prevent his ankle from dumping him to the marginally less filthy carpet. They helped him to hobble over to an equally filthy chair. It was an indication of the physicist's distress that he didn't try to remove a quantity of dust before dropping onto the upholstered mess. A spring poked up through the fabric beside him, and Larry didn't notice.

Don was more concerned with what else was going on. "Where is everyone?" he demanded. "What happened?"

"I broke my ankle," Larry tried to explain.

"Not broken, professor. Just sprained, more likely," was David's opinion after a hands-on exam.

"Broken," Larry insisted. "I distinctly felt the bone snap."

"Whatever." Don returned to the more important topic. "Where is everyone else?"

Larry too grew more concerned. "I don't know, Don. Charles went upstairs to retrieve more candles. We heard him yell, and during our attempt to render aid the staircase collapsed beneath me, and I fell into both the hole and a well of despair."

"Megan and Amita?"

"Unknown." Larry was unhappy over that as well. "They were coming after me, going to locate the staircase to the basement through the kitchen and then: nothing. I heard nothing further from either of them. And that was more than a half hour ago."

"We need to find them." That was obvious. But Don had spent many years in many difficult situations, and he wasn't about to let his feelings get in the way of resolving what had turned into a dangerous mess. "First, we need to hear what's been happening here. I'm going to assume that it's been a little more than anticipated."

"Quite accurate, Don." Larry quickly filled them in on the details. "Don, I am not one to propound a belief in the supernatural without substantive evidence, yet neither am I willing to dismiss it out of hand. This house has clearly been abandoned for years, however there are things occurring both within and without that defy rational explanation."

"Yeah." Don looked around, as if the answer would present itself on the spot. He came to a decision. "We going to look around, but we're going to keep in pairs. Colby, you stay here with Larry. Don't leave him; if something happens to David and I, get out of here and go for help. If Megan couldn't handle whatever was happening here, if David and I together can't handle it, we're going to need more than just a couple of handguns." He felt for his own gun in its holster under his arm, feeling its comforting weight dragging on him. _Well, maybe not so comforting_. As he'd reminded Larry, Megan was damn good with her own gun, and it hadn't helped. He took hold of himself; Megan had walked in unsuspecting, with three civilians, all of whom were accustomed to very cut and dried academic lifestyles. All three CalSci professors made their livings by predicting the future based on rules dictated by nature, and then teaching those rules to growing minds. They weren't used to dealing with the unpredictable. Unpredictable, for them, was a unique answer to a straightforward question by an undergraduate seeking a passing grade. Amusing, but rarely life-threatening.

FBI agents, on the other hand, were accustomed to the unpredictable. Criminal minds were continually seeking out new and unusual ways to get around the law, and an open mind was a prerequisite for this job. Don and his fellow agents would be better able to cope with whatever was going on in Larry's castle.

He hoped.

* * *

Hah. No light. No candles; those had been left on the top floor before he'd crashed through the weakened floor boards.

Charlie wondered where he was. He hadn't seen this part of Larry's mansion before, though it looked a lot like the rest of it: filthy, covered with dust, and dark.

_Really dark_. Charlie could barely make out anything in the shadows, and there wasn't enough light coming in through the dingy window high above his head to do more than highlight the little scurrying things, one of which ran over his foot. Charlie yelped and drew his foot back.

"Exterminator," he muttered under his breath. "First thing, Larry: you get an exterminator in here. Better yet, a whole team of them."

Shouting hadn't seemed to help. _Been there, done that, got the tee_, Charlie thought to himself. Nobody had heard or responded. Which meant that the other three were in trouble, because he couldn't imagine them not coming to his rescue. Which, traveling along the logical path, meant that a rescue wasn't going to arrive any time soon and that Charlie needed to get himself out of this mess by himself and then see about going to the aid of the others.

He was relatively undamaged, he decided. A few bumps and bruises, and there was a mild stinging along his arm which suggested a break in the skin, but that was it. And he was ambulatory, which was the important aspect.

It seemed to be some sort of a corridor, a hallway, and unfinished, from what he could see in the inadequate light. Beams lined the walls that no one had bothered to put wallboard onto. There were a couple of covered boxes here and there, covered with even more dust that he'd seen in the Great Room. Charlie could almost make out—yes, he really thought that those might be footprints in the dust. Real footprints, clearly shoes of some sort. Not an indistinct print on the carpet like he'd pointed out to the others in the Great Room. Someone had been here, and they'd been here less than two years ago. Charlie wasn't about to call himself a forensics specialist, but he'd bet the one-hundredth decimal of pi that those prints weren't more than a week old.

And neither he nor Larry nor Amita nor Megan had made these prints. Which was another broad hint that there was someone else in this old castle of Larry's. Which suggested that the 'ghost' that Amita had seen and the 'Bigfoot' knock-off were nothing more than tricks being played by someone.

But for what reason? Who would want to scare them away from this place? What were they hiding?

Answers. Questions deserved answers. Which meant that Charlie needed to get moving, to find both his friends and those answers. He hoisted himself back to his feet, sneezed once again, and reluctantly put his hand to the filthy wall to guide himself and prevent any blind stumbling into heavy beams.

_Ouch_. Low-lying ceiling beam, not seen in the dark.

Note to self: stay bent over.


	10. Stormy Night 10

"Megan! Amita!" Don rushed forward. "David, see anything?"

"Not a thing, Don." David allowed the senior agent to move in, keeping a watchful eye around the surroundings. The kitchen was marginally less dirty, showing evidence of recent cleaning interrupted by circumstances. Two bodies lay in the dirt, neither one of which was moving. One had a gun clenched in her hand, unwilling to let it go even in unconsciousness.

Don knelt. "They're alive," he reported with relief. "They're breathing, and each one has a pulse. What happened?"

"Good question." David was still scanning the room. The safety of the women assured, he began to methodically examine everything. "Doors are all unlocked, except for the one to the basement where Larry was. Back door: unlocked, knob works okay. This door here to the hall doesn't have a lock, knob's a little loose. Not seeing any footprints. Nothing obviously missing or broken. Revise that: got a bunch of broken plates and glasses here, but with this much dust on top of 'em, don't think it's recent. How are Megan and Amita?"

"Not a scratch on them," Don said. "Wait, Megan's coming around. Megan?" he called anxiously. "Megan, you okay?"

"Don't…think so…" she muttered, refusing to open her eyes. "Don, is that you? What the hell happened? What are you doing here?" She took a deep breath, trying to retrieve what little intelligence she had left, and groaned. "Would someone please amputate my head, and put me out of my misery?"

"Not yet, Megan," Don gently helped her to sit up, deftly relieving her of her gun and slipping on the safety. He frowned; the chambers were empty of bullets, and the smell of sulfur told him that the gun had recently been fired. The empty shells were scattered around her on the floor. His gut tightened. "What happened?"

"Didn't I just ask you that?" A memory attacked her, and Megan twisted swiftly around to look for the other member of her party. "Amita?"

Mistake. Moved too fast. She started to crumble into Don's arms, and he eased her back down onto the floor, using his jacket to cushion her head.

"Amita's okay," Don told her, "just taking a nap, like you were."

"Don't let her wake up. This headache's a killer."

"I won't," Don assured her, with a relieved grin. Megan was going to be all right, as was Amita. The complaint showed that to be true. That was three members of their party accounted for, three people alive if not exactly healthy. "Feel up to telling me what happened, Reeves?"

"No."

"Need a report anyway." Gently. There was still one mathematician missing and needing to be found.

Megan knew that, but there was a piece that she didn't know. "Larry! Larry's down in the basement!" she exclaimed, trying to get up unsuccessfully.

Don eased her back down a second time. "Yeah, we got him."

"He's all right?"

"He's all right," Don confirmed. "A little dented, but okay. What happened to you and Amita?"

"Charlie! Where's Charlie?"

"That's what we'd like to know," Don told her, keeping his own fear under tight control. Megan's question had just confirmed what he feared: that his brother was still among the missing. Time to get the profiler back onto track. "Larry told us what happened up until he dropped into the nether world. Now it's your turn. Reeves, report!"

Megan squeezed her eyes tightly together, took another deep breath, and began. "We—Amita and I—went after Larry, after he'd fallen into the basement. We knew where he was, and we didn't know where Charlie was, only that Charlie had gone upstairs and then yelled."

"Right." Not a good sign, but Megan had made the correct tactical decision. Don couldn't fault her. "Then?"

"We walked into the kitchen, and Bigfoot was there."

"Bigfoot?" Don couldn't help the skeptical tone.

"Right. Bigfoot. Six foot six, maybe more, lots of fur. Tall. Did I mention tall?" Megan added bitterly.

"You shot at it." Megan's gun was empty. Don had checked it himself.

"I shot it directly," Megan corrected him. "I emptied the clip into it. I put bullets into its gut, into its heart, I put two straight between the eyes, Don. It staggered, but it didn't go down."

David didn't take his eyes off of the windows, keeping watch. "You're telling me you emptied a whole clip into this thing, and didn't stop it?"

"Almost. I wasted a few bullets earlier, in the Great Room, trying to do the same thing with just as little luck, David. I'm telling you, Don," she shifted painfully around to look at her team leader, "Don, that thing is impervious to bullets. I don't know what it is, but I didn't kill it. And I know that I hit it over and over. I was less than ten feet away from it, Don!" Her voice was rising. "I put an entire clip into that thing, Don!"

"Okay, you hit it," Don soothed. "It didn't go down. What next? We found you unconscious, Megan, you and Amita. What happened after that? Did that Bigfoot thing attack you?"

Megan tried to remember. "No. No, Don, there was someone else here, someone that I didn't see at first. Someone, or some_thing_," she emphasized. "I smelled something, everything went black, and next thing I know, I'm waking up here on the floor."

"Not so loud," Amita groaned from her own spot on the floor. "What the hell happened?"

David holstered his gun—there didn't seem to be anyone or anything menacing them at the moment—and helped the young math professor to sit up herself, steadying her.

"Let's get them both into the Great Room," Don decided. "Safety in numbers."

"We have to go after Charlie!" Amita exclaimed. "Don, I heard him yell! He's in trouble!"

"And we're going after him," Don told her, "but we can't let ourselves get into more trouble. I want you and Megan in the Great Room with Larry and Colby. David and I will look for Charlie. And we'll be looking out for your Bigfoot guy."

"Don—"

"No argument, Reeves." When he used that wording, Megan knew that Don had made a command decision. "You'll back up Colby. From a sitting position." He handed back her gun.

Megan looked at, made a moue. It was empty. She'd fired everything she'd had at their attacker, and still came up short.

* * *

There was now a lump on his forehead, and a headache to go along with it, courtesy of yet another low-lying ceiling beam that he hadn't seen in the low light. This one, Charlie estimated, was the size of a hen's egg. He could feel it, soft and squishy with the underlying blood, swiftly swelling and probably turning dark purple. Not that he could see it. Feeling it was bad enough. _Gonna look really great walking into class Monday morning_, he thought ruefully.

There seemed to be more light at this end of the corridor. Either that, or his eyes were becoming more accustomed to the darkness. He still didn't dare move swiftly, for fear of more beams swinging down to knock him over the head, but his progress became a bit more secure.

A box caught his eye, one that was wrapped in old burlap and leaned against the side of the corridor. No, not a box, he decided, but an old picture covered over to protect it against all the filth around. _Larry's cousin was certainly an odd one_, Charlie decided. _They say it runs in families. I'll have to be sure to remind him of that, once I get out of this mess. 'Mess' being the operative word here_. But he couldn't resist pulling off a bit more of the covering, peering to see what elderly relative was immortalized within.

Nope. Some sort of still life, the ubiquitous bowl of fruit sitting on a table. Charlie couldn't make out the artist's signature. It looked old, it felt heavy, and that was Charlie's bottom line assessment of the thing. Larry could have it evaluated later to see if there was any real monetary worth to the thing. Right now, getting out of this predicament was Charlie's top priority. Middle to low end art collected by an eccentric relative—and, considering Larry himself, calling a relative of his _eccentric_ was going some—could wait.

* * *

This was business. This was not simply holing up in Larry's old castle waiting for a thunderstorm to pass. There was a missing FBI consultant and a Federal agent passed out on the floor of the kitchen along with a respected math professor who was another FBI consultant, so the FBI team would take an entirely justified temporary break from their primary hunt for the stolen Michelette in order to resolve this mystery before it turned into something for which they'd have to call in the National Guard. It had nothing to do with the fact that Charlie was Don's brother. That was beside the point. Don and David silently leap-frogged their way up the stairs to the hall on the second floor where Charlie had been heading so very long ago.

Of course, all of this could be just a boatload of coincidence, Don realized, doubting that it was so but being honest with himself. Finding Megan and Amita passed out in the kitchen? A cloud of cooking gas, left over in rotting pipes in a house that had been abandoned for years. Movement within had caused those pipes to leak. 'Bigfoot'? Hallucinations, caused by that gas and a really good haunted house story by the locals. Ghosts flying across the room, as Amita had said that she saw? Plenty of white curtains ready to drop from their rods, wafting through the corner of her eye with more of the gas seeping up from the kitchen to alter her perception of reality. People—like Charlie—disappearing? Rotted out floorboards. Look at Larry falling through the staircase. The same could have happened to his brother, and probably had.

But on the other hand…

Don gestured with his gun to David. _Clear. Move forward_.

David slipped ahead, silent on the dusty carpets, hugging the walls and sliding around the figurines on pedestals that seemed to dot every available square inch of wall space available. He paused, listening for movement, heard none, and moved again. He nearly bumped over another pedestal, catching it before it could crash and alert everyone and everything that the pair of them were upstairs. _Just because Bigfoot might be a figment of people's imagination doesn't mean that it _is_ a figment._

Don pussy-footed it behind him, catching up and over-taking his team mate. He poked his head into the first room for a quick peek, hoping not to get his head blown off or removed by the swipe of the over-large claws that Amita had described just moments earlier.

Nothing. Not a thing was moving, not even the curtains with the wind sweeping in past window panes long past their prime for keeping out the cold. _Looking at springing for new insulated windows here, Dr. Fleinhardt?_ No holes in the floor where his brother could have plunged through, not even the thick dust disturbed. And the curtains were still hanging limply from their rods; not one had flown down to the floor or out through the window pretending to be an apparition. Not this room; it was innocent as the fallen snow that would try to hide out in the unheated closet once winter settled in. Don backed out, shaking his head silently at David. _Let's try the next one_.

They backed out into the hall, watching 360 degrees worth of real estate and belatedly even thinking about something flying down on them from above a la Amita's ghost. _Mustn't forget the floor, either_, Don thought sourly, thinking about Larry ending up in the basement which presumably was where his brother was as well. But procedure was very clear: look for the missing man first where he had vanished unless there was clear evidence of where he was. And since Larry hadn't seen or heard from Charlie, darkness or no, the basement where they'd rescued Larry from was not the basement where Charlie was. Was there more than one basement? Possible. This was a big building. Rotting and ready to collapse, but big and it would take a while to search thoroughly.

Supernatural or not, there was definitely a spooky feeling about this place. Don paused to sniff, wondering if the gas that had felled Megan and Amita could be smelled. He tightened his lips. Either there was no gas, or it was odorless, in which case Colby might end up dragging two more bodies down the staircase in a hurry. Don winced at the thought of the bruises that would be left to heal over the next few weeks.

It was the shadows. It had to be the shadows. The storm was finally deigning to clear out, leaving broken branches and minor downhill floods behind, but it was well into night and the starlight just wasn't about to cut it, not with all the dirt preventing photonic entry. Don suddenly wished for not just the flashlight in his hand but an entire array of spotlights to light up all the various corners, to separate the dust bunnies from the tarantulas ready to leap upon them.

Another floor board creaked and dipped beneath him, offering a naked threat to break and stab Don with a splinter the size of a harpoon. Don halted in his tracks, easing his weight back before disaster could befall him—literally. It had happened to Larry, it had likely happened to Charlie, and it could happen to Don as well. David too paused, waiting until safety was re-established.

Wait. Don stopped. Something niggled at him, something that around him. Something, or someone, was watching him. No, it was just those damn oil paintings that dotted all the walls like an Eighteenth Century Rogue's Gallery of—

_Crap_. That one, that one right there, the old guy with a skinny little beard-let dressed in a pumpkin suit. Don had a sinking feeling that he'd seen it before. Not the real thing, but a picture of a picture. A picture of a really ugly old dude with really bad taste in fluorescent orange clothes. He tapped David with his free hand, gesturing toward it.

David's eyes widened, confirming Don's suspicions. David looked more closely at the painting, shining his flash a mere few inches from the oil. He shook his head grimly and mouthed, _real?_

_Ya think? You know more about art stuff than I do, David._

_It's got dust on it._

_Not as much as some of the other stuff around here. Looks newer. Like it got put up not too long ago._

Another unvoiced word emerged from David's lips which Don thankfully couldn't see well enough in the dark to translate but that he had little difficulty figuring out the meaning of. That opened up another set of questions, beginning with how the hell did the Michelette get here in Larry's inherited mansion? Somehow Don tended to doubt that Larry, despite his smaller shoe size, fit the description of a high end art thief cat burglar. No, if Dr. Fleinhardt was in the mood to steal a painting, he'd come up with some elegant physics thing that would waft this monstrosity across the room and out through the front door of the museum. Dr. Fleinhardt was not the type to scuttle out through a window. A steam tunnel, maybe; but never a window.

David looked closely again, unable to believe what his eyes were telling him. He took a deep, grim breath. _Could be the real thing, Don_._ I think it is._

An entire scenario flashed into existence, one that Don wasn't particularly pleased to be thinking about, his thoughts roaming around the three Duckett sisters that they'd interviewed earlier this rainy evening. Yeah, that one was in a wheelchair, but she seemed to be the computer whiz who could have been the one doing the tune up on the Chromantic and the Wrachet. And there was nothing saying that the other two couldn't have teamed up with yet a fourth person, yet to be identified, to work the job. There were, after all, three sets of footprints on the roof of the museum.

And from David's expression, the same scenario was oozing through the other FBI agent's thoughts as well. But who could it be? There weren't many people in Ferresville, and leaving a painting like the Michelette hanging around—no pun intended—was not something that a thief was likely to do. No, whoever the culprit was, it had to be someone local, either someone that the FBI had met or one of the other thirteen inhabitants that Ferresville boasted.

This outing had suddenly become a lot more serious, and Don was grateful that his gun was in his hand. There wasn't anyone to shoot at, but that could change in an instant. This quantity of money tended to make people just a little more than nervous and people who lived in the hindquarters of nowhere like Ferresville tended to be just a mite handy with guns, just as a general rule.

That led to a whole series of unpleasant concepts: the whole 'haunted house' thing was a ploy to encourage unwanted visitors to move on and not take a close look at an expensive stolen painting or two. The gas that had knocked Megan and Amita for a loop hadn't come from any rotted out pipes but from a deliberate attempt to get rid of them. It would take a Forensics team to say for certain, but Don wasn't about to rule out the deliberate weakening of the stair treads that had sent Larry crashing to the basement.

And his brother? Where was the man? Another basement accident? Or something more sinister, like Charlie discovering the truth and being captured or even killed by the art thieves? High end art thieves tended not to be murderers, but that didn't mean that they wouldn't take whatever steps they felt necessary to prevent exposure. Hiding in shadows was their stock in trade, and having a world class mathematician with connections all the way up to the highest levels in Washington in their collective face was not the way to maintain a low profile.

All of which meant that Don was now in high stress mode, nerves stretched and taut, ready to take whatever action was needed in a split second. And from David's stance, his fellow agent was in a similar state of readiness. They eased their way through the corridor, now identifying many of the objets d'art as potential stolen objects. Don tightened his lips. Recovery of those items would take a back seat to both recovery of Don's brother and recovery of the thieves.

Next room: Don listened carefully, heard nothing. He used the barrel of his gun to gently nudge the door open, wincing at the creak that screeled out to assault their ears. Well, no use in pretending that they weren't coming in to look around. And no use in getting his head shot off; Don crouched as he eased his way inside, grateful that his eyes had already adjusted to the dim light.

Nothing. Nothing but more art objects. Nothing living or breathing unless one wanted to count the spiders and bats, and right now Don didn't want to count them. He wanted Charlie to count them or at least estimate the sheer number of the beasts based on whatever formula the man wanted to use, because that would mean that Charlie was safe and under his brother's watchful gaze.

_Just like when we were kids, right, Eppes? Things haven't changed much_. The guy might be a genius at CalSci with a track record to rival Einstein, but Don was still looking out for him. _Maybe I don't want to stop? Maybe if I stop, he'll prove to everyone that he really can take care of himself, just like everyone else. That he doesn't need me._

_Get your head out of your ass, Eppes, and your mind back where it belongs. Eat a bullet, and you won't have to worry about Charlie_.

Third room: a little more alarming. It wasn't the large bed off to one side with the linens that looked clean, as though someone—Amita, most likely?—had recently done a baseline restoration. It wasn't even the substantial lack of cobwebs that had been ripped from every corner of the room. Don's eyes had adjusted to the gloom, and very quickly identified the black spot in the center of the room as a hole that someone had fallen through. The splinters on the edge suggested that the hole was not the type to have been carefully planned out in advance with a saw to make the edges neat and tidy. No, Don made the very obvious deduction that his brother, going into the room to fetch more candles, had walked across those floor boards and dropped through when the wood had cracked underneath his weight. The question was: was the fall engineered ahead of time? Had someone deliberately weakened the floor to make that happen? Or had Charlie simply been the unlucky person who had stepped on the wrong floorboard at the wrong time? All a coincidence?

Don knew what Charlie would say: _"Let me tap in the _insert theorem name_ analysis along with the parameters of the wood and the age of the house, and I'll have the answer for you in a moment."_ But Don didn't want probabilities, he wanted his brother back, preferably in one piece.

David pointed his flashlight into the hole. The light disappeared into the depths, not revealing anything but a very deep pit with nothing moving down below. "Charlie? Charlie?"

No answer, not that Don expected one. "Where do you think it leads to?" Don asked.

David shrugged grimly. "We're on the top floor, and this hole looks like it leads through the main level to something down below. Does this place have two basements? It's big enough, but that sounds odd, even for a relative of Larry."

Don peered more closely, trying to decipher which room was directly below. "That look like the pantry, off the kitchen? Maybe we can take a better look from there."

David swung the flash around, trying to identify some of the surrounding items. "Yeah, I think you're right. Those look like shelves over there, with a few cans on them. Probably the pantry, although those cans could be paint cans. Maybe an outside shed, attached to the house?"

"Maybe," Don allowed. "Let's head back downstairs, see what we can find out. And fill in the others," he added. He thought a moment. "And bring the Michelette, too," he decided. "We came a hell of a long way for it, and I'll be damned if I'm leaving it behind."


	11. Stormy night 11

Dead end. Charlie felt around the edges of his corridor, hoping to find an exit. Nothing. _Nada_. No way out, not even a convenient hole in the floor to fall through, the way that he'd gotten himself into this mess. He was already on the bottom floor, with the ground underneath him barely covered by some rough planking. There was an uncomfortable splinter in his hand from a spill; he'd whacked himself on the head—_again!_—and fallen over and collected it on the way back up while grabbing onto a joist to haul himself upright.

Where were the others? Surely they'd missed him by now, wanting the candles for light if for nothing else. Charlie estimated that it had been a good hour since he'd gone upstairs after the candles, possibly longer considering that he'd been knocked silly by the fall through the floor. He listened again, for the ten to the seventh time, but there was no one calling his name.

He could feel miffed, Charlie thought, but underlying all of the annoyance was a healthy dose of fear. Like the rest, he'd seen that fur-covered whatever-it-was, and was more than willing to acknowledge that it was dangerous. Bigfoot? Never been proven to exist, but, as Larry had pointed out, that didn't mean that it _didn't_ exist. The creature could just be very very good at hiding for a very long time. The probabilities of existence could be several billion to one, but there was always that one chance, that one possibility that had popped up on Larry's new doorstep, figuratively speaking.

Bottom line, he was on his own. Charlie needed to find a way out of this tight spot by himself, then track down the other three. He was certain that something had happened to them, because otherwise they'd be searching for him, yelling for him to answer. No calls meant they were in trouble. And since the cell phone service up in these mountains bordered on non-existent, that meant that Charlie needed to step up to the plate.

Which meant that he wished that Megan's gun was in his belt, and not her purse. Which meant that he wished that he'd asked for another lesson on how to use the thing without blowing his hand off. Which meant that he wished that he didn't have to wish for it in the first place, while he was at the wishing stage of things. Which meant that he wished he could find a way out of this corridor without any opening.

He continued to feel around the edges of his predicament, cringing at the feel of spider webs and worse on his fingers, trying to avoid picking up yet another splinter on the rough wood. Knot hole there, solid wood; Charlie gave it a kick just to see if something would knock itself out of the way and let him out. At this point in time, he'd even be willing to exit out into the rain so that he could walk around the house to the front door to rejoin the others.

_Think, Charlie!_ There had to be a way out of here. If someone built it, there had to be an exit. All he had to do was find it. _Therein lies the rub_, he thought. Shakespeare, Hamlet's soliloquy. _Hah. I've just impressed myself; I didn't think I'd remember that much from that gawd-awful freshman English class at Princeton I was forced to take so many years ago._

_And I really don't want my last thoughts on Earth to be of English literature. Why don't I work at calculating the odds of escaping this maze?_

_Yeah. That would be better_.

* * *

At first glance, it looked almost serene. Larry was on the sofa, foot propped up on pillows and looking like he deserved an ice pack from the freezer that was no longer functioning. Megan was sitting beside him, her hands carefully on her lap. Empty. Her hands were empty. The gun was not in them, despite the scare that they'd had earlier.

In fact, Colby's hands too were empty, and he was seated on the over-stuffed chair facing them, his hands carefully positioned on his knees where they could be seen. That struck a wrong note; Colby was the type to perch himself on the arm of a chair. The man, hyperactive, had a tough time sitting down. He was more likely to flop briefly onto a flat surface, then pop up to go chasing after some suspect. Yet there he was, sitting, with empty hands. Amita was in the other chair, facing the stairs that Don and David were descending, her face wooden.

They had visitors. Two of them, in fact, both of them that Don and David recognized from a humiliating interrogation earlier that afternoon. It was two out of the three Duckett sisters, Nicole and Joanie, both of whom currently had guns in their hands and Megan's and Colby's handguns tucked into their waistbands for safe-keeping. Joanie had her gun approximately two inches from Amita's left ear, and Nicole was offering a similar service for Larry. Smart chicks; they knew that there would be a higher likelihood of Megan or Colby doing something brave with a correspondingly higher probability of success, and that the Duckett sisters could improve those odds by threatening the hapless civilians to keep the professionals under control. Hell, sounding like Charlie, now, calculating the odds of success. _At least Charlie isn't in this mess_.

There was nothing wrong with either Don or David's reflexes. Guns snapped into their hands, locked onto the two women. The Michelette in David's hands dropped, clattered down the final three steps, alerting the Duckett sisters that the remainder of the FBI team was here, on schedule.

"Freeze!" Don snapped, sighting on Joanie, knowing that David would have a bead on Nicole. "FBI!"

But the Duckett sisters knew that they had the upper hand. Nicole smiled prettily. "Don't think so, Agent Eppes. One wrong move, and these two will be missing a fairly large chunk of hair."

"Sorry, Don." Colby was really unhappy. "They popped out from behind the fireplace. Never saw 'em coming. This place really does have hidden passageways; a whole mess of 'em."

Megan spoke to the more important matter. "I'd be real careful if I were you, ladies. Those two FBI agents up there have spent hours on the practice range, in preparation for something like this." The profiler was doing hostage negotiations. It wasn't often that she herself was one of the hostages, but the principles were the same. She kept on talking, keeping things calm, trying to lull her captors into a giving up without a fight. "Do you really want to bet your _lives_ on hoping that they won't drill you between the eyes before you can squeeze those triggers?" She switched tactics, now offering the carrot. "No one's gotten hurt yet. A good lawyer might even have you out in a short time, but that won't happen if someone gets killed. Put the guns down, and we can make this come out right."

"Oh, we'll make this come out right," Joanie told her, not taking her eyes off of Don and David. "Gentlemen, put down your guns, or we'll find out how this lady here like having her hair parted on the wrong side of her head."

"Okay, okay, let's keep our cool here." Those two weren't playing around, Don realized. "We can all walk away from this. Let's not let it get out of hand."

"Sounds good to me," Nicole chirped. "Put 'em down, boys, and nobody'll get hurt. But we _will_ be taking our things away from here, including that really hideous painting that you just dropped down the stairs. I hope you didn't chip the paint."

"You think it's ugly, too?" David asked.

"Yeah, but I have no taste. My art history professors at the university all said so," Nicole admitted, and smirked. "Doesn't mean I didn't learn anything. Learned all about what sells for a really high amount on the black market, ugly or not."

"We also learned how to hang onto things for a while, until they cooled off," Joanie added. "See all the trouble you're putting us to? Now we have to find another place to stash our stuff."

It clicked. "This is your warehouse, for the things that you've stolen," Don realized. "All the art here—all stolen?"

"Well, no, not all of it," Joanie admitted. "There's that ceramic figurine of Rodin's Thinker upstairs that Isabel bought several years ago. Worthless, of course, but we never got around to chucking it."

"Thank you for that," Larry said with black humor. "I am grateful to have a cheap imitation to remember her by."

"Answer me one question," Megan said. "The big hairy creature?"

"Ah, you mean my Bigfoot costume?" Joanie chuckled. "Liked it, did you?"

"Scared the hell out of me," Megan admitted. Only her fellow agents could see her trying to worm her way into her captors' good graces. "But I put three bullets straight between your eyes. How come you're still standing?"

Joanie grinned. "Do I look like I'm seven feet tall? Your aim is good, FBI lady. I'm going to have to find some rabbit fur pieces to sew up the holes you put in it, and another glass eye from the taxidermist. Luckily for me, the head is eighteen inches above mine. I was looking through a place in Bigfoot's chest. You scared the hell out of me too, you know."

"Thanks," Megan said wryly. "Nice to know that my aim wasn't off. What about in the kitchen? Some of my bullets went into your gut."

Joanie smirked. "Thought you might try something like that, so I propped up the costume with a stick inside. You shot up the fur piece, and I poured knock out gas out at you, both of you. Worked like a charm. Better than it did on our little professor lady upstairs, earlier."

"So this was all to scare us off?" Larry asked bitterly. "This was my second cousin thrice removed's mansion. How long have you been depositing your ill-gotten gains here, making me an accessory to your heinous acts?"

"Don't worry, Larry." Don didn't budge from watching Joanie's every move. "It's pretty obvious that you weren't involved. Ladies, this is your last chance. Put those guns down, and nobody gets hurt. You're not walking away from here." He sighted down the barrel of his gun.

"And neither will you, Special Agent Eppes." It was a new voice, also feminine—and very determined. And it came from the other side of the stairs. "Drop your own guns, both of you, and I won't have to shoot you. Trust me; I'm a good shot. Neither one of you will be able to get off a decent aim before I wing you."

It was Marybel. But it was a Marybel standing on her own two feet, with a handgun aimed at Don's chest. At this distance, he realized, she'd blow a hole in him the size of that Michelette painting. Don froze, feeling David turn into a statue beside him.

"And, yes, before you say anything, yes, I'm standing. The reports of my injury were greatly exaggerated. Had you going, didn't I?" Marybel asked cheerfully. "Almost pulled it off. Nobody would believe that the poor little cripple was actually a third story cat burglar. I really was in a car accident several years ago, but I had a couple of excellent physical therapists and a wonderful plan for making my first million to spur me back to health. Worked, didn't it?" Then her voice stiffened. "I mean it, gentlemen. Guns down, _now_."

She had them. Any further delay, and the two civilians would be two corpses. Despite all the banter, there was a determination in the three Duckett sisters that warned Don not to push. From the expression on Megan's face, the profiler was in agreement. Fun time was over.

"All right," he said, stalling—_for what? The cavalry? Not gonna happen, Eppes_. "All right. I'm putting my gun down. David, you too." He stooped slowly, carefully placing the piece onto the filthy carpet, wondering if he'd ever have the opportunity to clean it again.

"Kick them over this way." Marybel Duckett wasn't taking any chances. Grimacing, Don complied, sighing as David also followed suit. _One long leap for the gun, one short hop into a hole six feet under._

"Thanks." Now that the FBI agents were disarmed, Marybel was ready for more fun. She sauntered over, long legs in short shorts, bent over at the waist to pick up those handguns and making certain that all the men in the room could see her doing it. "Really had you going, didn't I? Poor little girl in the wheelchair. Made you feel like real heels, didn't I? And all the time I was laughing like you couldn't believe. Of course, you almost had us at one point. I had to stall to keep you from going into the back room before Joanie got back from playing Bigfoot. Did you know that there's a tunnel from this junk heap that opens up in a cave not far from our place? That's what gave us the idea to store everything here, after Isabel passed away."

"But you." Nicole nudged Larry with her gun. "You had to come up here, see the place for yourself. Why couldn't you have just hired someone around here to sell it for you? We'd have taken off your hands, and at a profit to you. You'd never have known what was going on. Everyone would have benefited."

"Believe me, Ms. Duckett, at the moment I am truly wishing that I had," Dr. Fleinhardt told her bitterly. "Cousin Isabel was a trial to me in life, and she continues to do so in her afterlife."

"Well, you'll have plenty of time to consider your troubles," Joanie told him. "You, missy with the mouth," she said to Megan. "Take this rope, and tie everyone up. Good knots," she warned. "Anyone who is able to squirm out of those ropes, I'll shoot. Don't be responsible for killing anyone."

"What are you going to do?" Don asked, weighing the odds. Criminals like this, ones that could be identified, they tended to kill their victims. Under the circumstances, Don was going to consider going for the jump; _nothing to lose, friends_.

"Fall back plan," Nicole said. "We'll clean out the house to our next location, and disappear; if you're thinking that you've got nothing to lose, don't. We already have our next identities picked out, and somehow I doubt that you'll be able to locate us. I hear Florida is nice this time of year, and the hurricanes have made some of the property a bit on the cheap side. Not only that," she grinned, "but the records got washed away in the floods. Makes it a bit difficult to trace people. Oh, and don't bother looking for any of the art to surface," she added. "The fence we use is careful. This stuff will never see the light of day for the next three decades. Which, in the case of the Michelette," she decided, "is a good thing."

"Gotta agree with you there," Colby grumped.

"Freeze!"

Marybel froze. Anyone would, with a gun poked into her back.

"One move, and you really will be a cripple for life."

It was Charlie. Dust and cobweb-covered, but Charlie. There was blood from a cut on his forehead, he had a shiner the size of the unseen moon outside, and he was limping, but it was Charlie. And Don was glad to see him.

"Charlie!" Don exclaimed. It was humiliating to be rescued by his geek math brother but at the moment, Don was willing to live with it, the operant word being 'live'.

Charlie shoved the gun a little harder, pushing a squeak out of Marybel. "Drop the gun, or I'll shoot."

Not truly a hardened criminal. Marybel scrunched her face up in fear, trembling. Her hand froze, and the gun dangled, not shaking loose.

"You were missing," Joanie wailed in dismay. "You fell through the floor! What happened to you? I thought you were stuck somewhere."

"I was." Charlie shoved the gun a little further into Marybel's back, eliciting a second small shriek of fear. "Drop your gun to the floor, too, lady. At this range, I can't miss. You'll be caring for your sister as a cripple in prison." He waited until the FBI agents had confiscated all the firearms before answering Joanie's question. "I found a whole bunch of dust and canvas covered art, which led me to retrace my steps and find a way out. Did you know that the rain stopped?" he asked conversationally.

"Glad to hear it." Don was even more glad to have his gun back in his hand and the guns out of Nicole's.

"So am I," Larry said dourly. "Less mud to clean."

"Not by much, Larry. You've got some really terrible drainage around the foundation. You might want to look into re-grading the landscape." Charlie didn't take his eyes off of Marybel. "Get her gun, Don."

Don relieved the not-handicapped woman of her burden, the gun still trembling in Marybel's hand and hanging by a thread. Something was bothering him. There weren't enough guns accounted for, unless the Duckett sisters had left an extra one down where Charlie had fallen—"Charlie? Where'd you get a gun—oh."

His brother held up a partially rusted old pipe. "There's also some leavings from a plumbing job that could stand getting thrown out," Charlie offered weakly. "I figured that if she didn't think it was a gun, I could always hit her with it." He gulped, suddenly realizing what he'd just done—and shaking. "I think…I'd better sit down," he said.

The look that Marybel gave the math professor would have skewered cement but Don's expression more than made up for it. "Nice work, Charlie," he told him, and meaning it.

"Yeah. Nice work. Now put them hands up, all of you." It was a new voice, and it was a crusty old codger voice, and it meant business. The owner of the voice stepped forward, into view, behind Charlie. The shotgun that the storekeeper Mr. Caldwell held backed up his intentions. The barrel was now all of two inches from Charlie's spine. "Unless you want this here feller to need Marybel's old wheelchair, seein' as how she ain't gonna be needin' it no more."

Once more, the handguns ended up on the floor and out of the hands of the FBI agents. _I'm getting tired of leaning over to put them down and then pick them back up_. But Don's complaint stayed un-voiced.

"Thanks, Uncle Jed." Joanie moved around to collect the handguns once again.

"'_Uncle_'?"

"Well, yeah." Joanie gave David a strange look. "You don't think we live here in Ferresville for the ambience, do you? With Isabel for a neighbor? Get real."

"I empathize." Larry's face was getting more and more disgruntled.

"Always said that women oughtn't to git themselves educated. Lookit what it did for my nieces. Turned 'em into thieves, it did. Might of taken 'em a whole bunch of years to make me a rich man if they hadn't done that. Marybel learned about computer stuff. That Nicole learned to tell which paintings and stuff are the valuable ones."

Nicole went for embarrassed. "Oh, Uncle Jed, it's all there in the text books, if you just take the time to look it up. Or on the internet," she added thoughtfully. "Wonderful invention."

Marybel agreed. "If it hadn't been for needing that Chromantic, we'd still be in business. Who would have thought that buying something over the internet would get us into trouble?"

"Me," her uncle replied promptly. "Phones is good enough fer me, girlie. Told you no good would come of messing with them computer things. Caused the Cold War, it did."

"And how do you figure that?" Charlie couldn't help but ask.

"What else got them Russkies all riled up? Race to the moon?"

"Couldn't possibly have been Communism," Megan murmured.

"'Nuff chattering, specially from educated wimmen!" Caldwell snapped. "Bet you can't even cook a man a decent breakfast."

Amita glared at him. "You wouldn't know an educated woman if she recited the Pythagorean—"

"You shut yer mouth, woman, or I'll shut it fer you," Caldwell told her. "Gittin' above yourself. We're gonna take this one along with us, just so's none of you git any fancy ideas about followin' us. You, there, woman; git up."

"And what if I don't?" Amita had had enough.

"Then I'll jist have to pull this here trigger—"

"Jebediah Ferres Caldwell, you put that there peashooter down afore I plug you one!"

They all recognized the voice: Violet Ferres, town clerk. Next to her stood another elderly man with a large gold shield pinned to his red plaid shirt. Both of them held shotguns that could have been triplets with the one that Caldwell held.

Caldwell dropped his jaw. "Bernie? Violet?"

"You heard me, Jebediah," Violet Ferres told him. "Put the dang gun down afore I shoot it out of your dang hands. And you know I can do it," she reminded him. "I won that shootin' contest fair and square back in Fifty-Six."

"That was near fifty years ago, Violet. I've gotten better."

"So have I, Jeb," she told him. "Now put the dang gun down and come along peaceably. You too, sisters. I've had my eye on you ever since you came back all educated and figuring on how to get above yerselves without no effort to it. You always was the lazy types." She turned to Don. "Mr. Government Man, you'd best pick up all yer guns afore them Duckett sisters try to turn the tables again. Happened so many times, I cain't keep it all straight. Bernie, you get Jeb's gun afore he shoots his own foot off."

Bernie, the-mayor-and-chief-of-police, winked at Don. "Best thing I ever did, deputizing Mz Violet. She runs this place like nobody's business. I don't have to do a thing; just sit back and watch."

"Believe me, sir, if I had someone as efficient as Ms. Violet, I'd do the same thing," Don assured him.


	12. Stormy Night epilog

"That'll be twenty five smackers," Violet Ferres announced, "each."

"Madam, the use of your tow truck was worth every penny," Dr. Fleinhardt assured her. "I am indeed grateful that the sun is shining, that our vehicle has been released from its mud-bound prison, and that we will momentarily be on our way back to civilize—ahem, CalSci."

"You sure you don't want to stick around and see what stolen treasures turn up in your mansion, Larry?" Don wasn't above a bit of teasing. "Hey, we might break something accidentally while recovering all the stolen goods, that the FBI would then have to reimburse you for."

"I will forego that pleasure, Don." Larry gritted his teeth, forcing his lips into a false smile. "Indeed, I would rather face my Physics for Pharmers class on an empty stomach than—" he broke off, catching sight of Violet Ferres' face ready to erupt in a thundercloud of her own.

"You got somethin' against farmers, with all yer education, mister?"

"I think we'd better get going, Larry," Charlie put in hastily. "Ms. Ferres, we can't thank you enough for all your hospitality and for your help with settling my friend's estate. And Dr. Fleinhardt will certainly be in touch with your cousin the real estate agent just as soon as the FBI releases the property from its investigations. C'mon, Larry," he said, tugging his colleague by the sleeve. _Before something else comes out of your mouth that she can charge us for._

"But Charles! I will be charged six per cent of the selling price—"

Charlie looked his friend straight in the eye. "Bigfoot."

Larry froze. "Quite right, Charles." He spun on his foot. "Ms. Ferres, it has been a truly unique event in making your acquaintance, an event which I strongly believe and devoutly hope will never be equaled for the rest of my days. Good day, madam, and give my best to your cousin, the realtor. Please inform her that email consultations over the disposition of my property are to be encouraged, and will result in an increase of the profit that she will receive upon successful completion of the transaction."

Ms. Ferres beamed at this evidence of wealth soon to be bestowed upon her cousin, the realtor. "See you soon, city boys. And you, Mr. Government Man, you stickin' around fer a while?"

Don shook his head, not bothering to hide the grin. "Like to, Ms. Ferres, but I've got a feeling that it's going to be a mite crowded in these parts once my Forensics Team gets up here to look at all the loot in Cousin Isabel's place. You might want to consider re-opening Mikey's old hotel for a couple of weeks. Couple of hot meals every now and again might scare up some real money."

Violet Ferres got a gleam in her eye. "Might, at that," she agreed. "You got a good head on your shoulders, Mr. Government Man. Appreciate the thought."

Don turned to his team. "How about you two? Be useful to keep someone on the premises while cataloguing the stolen property. David?"

David got an alarmed expression on his face. He quickly turned and walked off, walked directly away from his team leader. "Hey, Larry! Megan! Charlie! Amita! Wait up! You guys have any room in that SUV?"

Ms. Violet squinted. "What's wrong with him?" She snorted. "You'd think he'd seen a were-wolf, or something like."

Don made a note of the desperation he heard in David's voice. He grinned. "Nah. Just Bigfoot, Ms. Violet. Just Bigfoot." Someday, this would be a useful thing to remember. And a great tale to tell someone's kids. Like David's.


End file.
